Originally issued as an Appendix to the pamphlet
The Arrival of the Daguerreotype in New York
published by the American Photographic
Historical Society, New York in December 1994.
Although R. Derek Wood has by profession worked in London in laboratories of electron microscopy in biomedical research, he has long been fascinated by the earliest years of photography and the pre–history of the subject. When seeking to establish what reality might lie behind insubstantial stories in photographic histories about supposed pre–1839 experiments on photography by the Rev. J. B. Reade in England (a study published in Annals of Science in 1971), he particularly realised that contemporary sources do not accord with standard accounts of the beginnings of photography based more on later photographic literature. He believes that our understanding of those beginnings are greatly constrained by concepts too much centred on W. H. F. Talbot, and hopes in the future to try to readjust those parameters. Publications have included work on the significance of gallic acid in the first years (Journal of Photographic Science, January 1980), and on both calotype and daguerreotype patents derived from legal documents of the 1840s and early 1850s (Annals of Science, March and September 1971, History of Photography, October 1979). After an interval of more than a decade entirely away from the subject, Derek Wood has recently returned to research with a study of the Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s (History of Photography, Autumn 1993). Daguerreotype themes are dealt with in a linked series of articles awaiting publication on the financial aspects of Daguerre’s dioramas in the 1830s and the fire at the diorama in Paris in March 1839 (Photoresearcher, in press), on the progress through the French Parliament of the Bill to award a pension to Daguerre, and an annotated bibliography of Arago’s lecture on 19 August 1839. A companion article to the present essay provides a link between the arrival of the daguerreotype in South America with the first daguerreoype to be taken in Australia: ‘The voyage of Captain Lucas’ appears in the New Zealand Journal of Photography in August 1994. Research amongst records of the British Foreign Office has revealed some information about photocopying done in London in January 1843 on the chinese–character protocol of the Treaty of Nanking and two articles written on this subject are expected to appear next year.
[Back to previous page] R. D. Wood’s Midley History of Early Photography: [Home Page]