Lace

25 January 1839

First showing of photographs at the Royal Institution

Shortly after Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype was announced in early January, Talbot asserted his priority and, at a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, exhibited several paper photographs he had made in 1835. Within a fortnight he described the nature of his process to the Royal Society, while Daguerre revealed no useful details of his own until mid-August.

1840

Invents the calotype

Talbot found a way to print any number of positives on salted paper from a paper negative; new chemicals cut the exposure to a minute in bright sunlight. He called the method the “calotype” (from kalos, beautiful), informally the “talbotype”: unlike the daguerreotype with its single positive, it effectively created modern photography.

1840–1841

Post: High Sheriff of Wiltshire

February 1841

Patents the calotype

Talbot obtained an English patent for the calotype process and sold licences at £20 each, later lowering the fee for amateurs to £4 while professionals paid up to £300 a year; scientists saw it as a hindrance to scientific freedom. He justified his rigour by the roughly £5,000 he had spent on photography; for science the method was free, and Talbot himself published the first known photomicrograph of a mineral crystal.

1844–1846

“The Pencil of Nature”, the first photobook, appears

Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans issued the book in separate parts: 24 prints, each pasted in by hand and accompanied by a short text. Talbot is regarded as the author of the first photographic book; scholars see in it the design of a new canon built on biblical rhetoric.

1851

Archer’s collodion process displaces the calotype

In the year of Daguerre’s death Frederick Scott Archer publicised the wet collodion process with a glass negative, which soon replaced the calotype in commercial use. Reading his patent broadly, Talbot declared that collodion users, too, needed his licence.