Botanical Specimen

10 december 1832 – 29 december 1834

Post: member of the 11th Parliament of the United Kingdom

1832–1835 · Loopbaan

Parliament for Chippenham

A moderate Reformer who generally supported the Whig ministers, Talbot sat in Parliament for Chippenham and retired from it in 1835.

early 1834

Photographic experiments begin

In early 1834 Talbot began the experiments on which he later based his claim to priority of invention. For his “photogenic drawing” he bathed writing paper in a weak solution of table salt and brushed it with a strong solution of silver nitrate; unlike Thomas Wedgwood and Nicéphore Niépce, he found ways to fix the image chemically so that it would not darken in daylight.

1835

The first negative on salted paper

Talbot made his first negative on paper soaked in silver nitrate and a salt solution, as he later recounted in “The Pencil of Nature”. Among his early pictures is the window of his own library, taken from inside with a camera whose optical lens measured only 8 centimetres.

1836

Daughter born: Ella Talbot

1836

Discovers the Talbot effect

In a paper in the Philosophical Magazine Talbot described how the image of a diffraction grating periodically changed colour as the focusing lens was moved away from it; the paper offered neither measurements nor an explanation. The self-imaging of a periodic grating is now called the Talbot effect.