Historique et description des procédés du daguerréotype et du diorama.
Paris: Béthune et Plon for Susse frères and Delloye, 1839. First edition, in the issue of the Paris stationers Susse frères, of the book by which the secret of the daguerreotype became public property. François Arago had announced the invention to the Académie des sciences on 7 January 1839 and described its results. How it was done stayed under seal until the law granting the inventors their pensions was signed on 7 August, and was first explained in public at the joint sitting of the two Academies on 19 August. This is the text that turned that explanation into instructions anyone could follow: seventy-nine pages, sold at two francs, in which the process the French state had just bought from Daguerre was printed in full. It gives the five operations that turn a plate of silvered copper into a picture, six plates of the apparatus drawn to a common scale, and the two parliamentary reports, by Arago and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, on which the purchase rested. Nicéphore Niépce’s own account of the earlier process from which Daguerre had begun is printed with them. Susse frères advertised it for sale on 5 September; at Daguerre’s first public demonstration two days later it was their copies, he afterwards testified, that he found in everyone’s hands; and theirs is the issue entered in the Bibliographie de la France on 14 September. The present copy is in the original yellow printed wrappers, untrimmed and unrestored. The first seven pages belong to the State. They print the bill that the Minister of the Interior, Duchâtel, laid before the Chamber of Deputies on 15 June 1839, and the agreement he had signed the day before with Daguerre and with Isidore Niépce, the son and heir of Daguerre’s late partner. The minister’s reasoning is on the second page: a process that anyone can work once it has been explained cannot be protected by a patent, and must therefore belong to everyone or remain unknown (“appartienne à tout le monde ou qu’il reste inconnu”). He reminded the Deputies that fifteen years of costly experiment had brought Daguerre to the point of fixing the image of the camera obscura in four or five minutes, where Niépce had needed at least twelve hours. Two hundred thousand francs, the minister says, had first been asked; Arago, in his report, calls that a misunderstanding and has Daguerre himself proposing an annuity of 8,000 francs to be divided equally. What the two accepted were annuities for life, 6,000 francs to Daguerre and 4,000 to Niépce, half of each reverting to their widows. Daguerre’s share was the larger, the minister explains, because he was also giving up a second secret, the method of painting and lighting the pictures of his Diorama; Arago gives as the chief reason his undertaking, written into the agreement, to publish any improvement he afterwards made to either invention. Until the law passed, the description of the process lay in a sealed packet which Arago had verified; had the Chambers not adopted the law within the session, the packet was to be returned and the agreement void. The Deputies voted the bill on 9 July; the Peers followed on 2 August, by 92 votes to 4. What the agreement required to be handed over — a history and description of Niépce’s process, of Daguerre’s, and of the Diorama — is the contents of the present book. Daguerre’s own text begins at page 57, under a title that defines the invention in one sentence: the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura, not in their colours but with great delicacy in the gradation of tones. The work is divided into five operations, and most of them open with a list of what the operator must have to hand. A sheet of copper plated with silver, 216 by 164 millimetres and no thicker than stout card, is polished with pumice and olive oil, cleaned with dilute nitric acid, and strongly heated over a spirit lamp. It is then fixed face down over a dish of iodine in a closed box until the silver has turned golden yellow, which takes from five minutes to half an hour. Four narrow strips of the same plated metal are pinned round the plate to keep the coat even at its edges, a precaution whose action, Arago remarks in his notes, nobody could yet explain. Within the hour it must go into the camera, whose lens the text specifies: achromatic, 81 millimetres across, with a focus of 38 centimetres and a diaphragm of 27 millimetres set in front of it. A mirror inside the camera rights the scene while the view is being chosen; to take the picture itself unreversed, a plate of glass is set in front of the diaphragm, at the cost of a third more time. The exposure itself cannot be prescribed, because the plate shows nothing while it is being made: at Paris it runs from three minutes to thirty — three or four in June and July, five or six in May and August, and longer in proportion as the year declines. At his first public demonstration, from a balcony of the Palais d’Orsay on a cloudy 7 September, Daguerre told his audience that twenty minutes would be needed. What comes out of the camera is an image that, as the text puts it, exists on the plate but is not visible. The fourth operation brings it out. The plate is set at forty-five degrees in a box above a cup holding a kilogram of mercury; a spirit lamp raises the mercury to sixty degrees centigrade; and the operator watches by candlelight through a glass window while the picture forms and the thermometer falls back to forty-five. The fifth operation removes the iodine, which would otherwise go on changing in the light until it destroyed the picture. Two baths are given for it, a saturated solution of common salt or a weak solution of hyposulphite of soda, and the text states that the hyposulphite is to be preferred, because it removes the iodine completely, which salt does not always do. The plate is then rinsed with not less than a litre of hot distilled water poured down it on an inclined stand, and mounted under glass, since the mercury that draws the image will not bear the lightest rubbing. A footnote records that every varnish Daguerre tried dulled the lights and, beginning after two or three months, ended by destroying the picture. The six plates show each piece of this equipment in plan and section — the heating frame and spirit lamp, the iodine box, the plate-holder with its two doors, the camera, the mercury box with its thermometer, the washing stand and kettle — to a scale of one metre printed on the second plate and serving for all. They were engraved for the publisher by Adam and Bury, on steel according to the advertisements; Susse frères sold the whole outfit ready-made at 350 francs. How the process worked, the book does not claim to know. In one of the notes he added to his report, Arago sets out the obvious explanation — that light drives the iodine off the silver, that mercury settles on the metal so exposed, and that the wash carries away the iodine that remains — and then shows that it will not do. It cannot account for the half-tones; and the chemist Pelouze had weighed a plate and found it lighter after the hyposulphite bath than it had been before the operations began. The same note gives Dumas’s estimate, from his own weighings, that the golden film of iodine is probably no more than a millionth of a millimetre thick. Between the parliamentary papers and the instructions stand twenty pages that make the book a party to a dispute. Niépce’s Notice sur l’héliographie, the description of his bitumen process that he drew up for Daguerre in December 1829 as their partnership was being concluded, is printed with Daguerre’s notes at the foot of every page. Niépce gives his principle in a sentence, that light hardens certain substances and makes them less soluble, and his practice in detail: bitumen of Judea dissolved in oil of lavender, spread on a polished plate with a dabber of soft leather, exposed in the camera, and washed with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum that carries off whatever the light has not hardened. Daguerre’s notes correct him point by point: the lightest tint the process gives is not white; an even coat cannot be laid with a dabber; Niépce never made an engraving from a camera image; and his use of iodine to blacken a finished plate shows that he did not know what iodine on silver does in the light. Daguerre then describes his own improvement of the older process, a resinous residue of oil of lavender in place of the bitumen, and admits that it still needed seven or eight hours for a view. A one-page historical note states the purpose of all this outright — extracts from Niépce’s letters are given to prove that he had no part in the discovery of the daguerreotype — and four letters of 1831 and 1832 follow, each certified as a true copy by Arago and Daguerre, in which Niépce reports his failures with the iodine Daguerre had recommended and doubts that anything can be made of it. The note records Niépce’s death on 5 July 1833 and the contract of 13 June 1837 by which his son agreed that the process should bear Daguerre’s name alone. A last letter, from Isidore himself in November 1837, grants that where his father’s process wanted most of a day Daguerre’s wanted four minutes. Isidore signed the agreement with the State; in 1841 he answered these pages with a pamphlet of his own, Historique de la découverte improprement nommée daguerréotype. The partnership those pages argue over had lasted less than four years. Daguerre, a scene-painter who had opened the Diorama with Charles Bouton in 1822, was by the book’s own account trying to fix the image of the camera obscura from 1824; Niépce, near Chalon-sur-Saône, had been at work since 1814. The two were first in touch in January 1826 and signed articles on 14 December 1829. Daguerre, who had been urging iodine on his partner since 1831, found after Niépce’s death that mercury vapour would bring out in minutes a picture the plate did not yet show. In 1838 he tried to sell the result, outright for 200,000 francs or by subscription at a thousand francs a share, and failed. He turned to Arago, who sat in the Chamber as deputy for the Pyrénées-Orientales, and the sale to the State followed. The Diorama burned on 8 March 1839, before the bill was drawn; Arago refers to the fire in his report. That report, printed here with the notes Arago added for the Comptes rendus, sets out where the invention came from and what he expected it to do. Holding that the historian of science may rely only on what has been printed, he traces the first outline of the art to Wedgwood’s memoir of 1802. He states what the process costs in time and money: ten or twelve minutes for a monument in the dull light of winter and half that in summer, half an hour to three quarters for the whole operation from preparing the plate to washing it, and three or four francs for each plate. Had it existed in 1798, he writes, France would possess faithful images of much that greed and vandalism have since taken from the monuments of Egypt; to copy the hieroglyphs of Thebes, Memphis, and Karnak would take legions of draughtsmen scores of years, and one man with a daguerreotype could do it. He gives the opinion of the painter Paul Delaroche, written at the commission’s request, that the plates would become a subject of study for the most accomplished painters and were an immense service to the arts. He observes that moonlight, which concentrated in the largest lens had never produced a physical effect, whitens Daguerre’s plates, and expects photographic maps of the Moon and a photometry of the stars to follow. On portraiture he is cautious. A sitter can be asked to keep still for four or five minutes, a note explains, but only full sun makes the exposure so short, and in full sun the sitter blinks and grimaces; Daguerre had found that the rays which pass a blue glass do nearly all the work, so that the face could be screened. A small advance, the report concludes, would be enough. Near its end the report says what France had done with the discovery: adopted it, and been proud to “doter libéralement le monde entier”. England was already excepted, a patent for the process having been sealed in London on 14 August. Gay-Lussac’s report to the Peers is a quarter the length. The daguerreotype, he told them, was “l’origine d’un art nouveau au milieu d’une vieille civilisation”, and its reagent would be to the intensity of light what the microscope is to small objects; since three or four minutes were enough, a battlefield could be recorded in its successive phases; and the problem of the portrait was all but solved. The last five pages supply what the agreement required of Daguerre besides. They describe how the pictures of the Diorama were painted on both faces of a cloth of percale or calico — a first effect on the front, in transparent colours and without white, and a second on the back, modelled in grey — and how, by lighting the one from in front and the other from behind through coloured screens, a daylight scene was made to pass into night. The Messe de minuit, the landslide in the valley of Goldau, and the Temple of Solomon are named among the pictures in which the method was worked out. The manual was sold by the shops that sold the apparatus, and the first edition exists with the names of several of them; the name of its publisher is on none. Pierre Harmant found him in 1977, in the law reports. He was Giraldon, an engraver and publisher, who by his own account had undertaken the brochure on terms that gave Daguerre a quarter of the proceeds; Daguerre for his part said he had sold him no exclusive right, only the advantage of coming out first with engravings of his drawings. Giraldon published the brochure and sold copies of it to Giroux, to Susse, and to the optician Lerebours, which went out under their names; when Giroux then reprinted it on his own account, Giraldon prosecuted him for piracy, and the depositions reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux are the evidence for the order of issue. It had been agreed that the first three hundred copies should go, under his own imprint, to Alphonse Giroux, the maker whose cameras Daguerre signed. Giroux deposed that the undertaking was not kept. Daguerre deposed that at his first demonstration on the quai d’Orsay he was astonished to see the brochure in everyone’s hands when he had no copy himself, and that those copies bore the address of Susse, who was to have been supplied only after Giroux. The newspapers bear him out. Giroux’s notices of late August promise an explanatory brochure in the future tense; the first advertisements of the book on sale, from 5 September, are those of Susse frères and Delloye, at two francs; Giroux’s follows on the 7th, the day of the demonstration; and on 14 September the Bibliographie de la France registers the book for the first time, as no. 4456, in the present issue: five and a quarter sheets from the press of Béthune, sold by Susse at 31 place de la Bourse and by Delloye. Harmant concluded that the manual was not to be had in August, and that if the Bibliographie de la France is to be believed, only Susse should be considered its original publishers. The older account put Giroux first. Beaumont Newhall, who in 1953 distinguished seven states of the first edition, all from the press of Béthune et Plon and differing chiefly in their imprints, set the Giroux state at their head, presuming it ready by 20 August on the assumption that the brochures reported to have reached Berlin with Giroux’s cameras on 6 September were of that issue; he did not claim to know the order of every state, and Harmant, finding no brochure mentioned in the Berlin dealer’s letter about the consignment, doubted that any had been in it and let the matter rest there. Copies with Giroux’s name and the imprint of Béthune et Plon exist, three of them by Harmant’s count, all in America; Giraldon deposed that Giroux, like Susse and Lerebours, had bought copies from him. The order in which the several titles were printed has not been established. Giroux’s own reprint, the Nouvelle édition with a portrait, at one franc, was registered on 28 September, and on 19 October a reissue by Susse from the same type, called a second edition on its title. In the present issue the verso of the half-title carries the publishers’ notice that apparatus made to Daguerre’s instructions, with lenses by Charles Chevalier, is on sale at their shop, where trial plates made with it could already be seen. The front wrapper prints the price, and the rear wrapper the business of the Maison Susse: stationery, bronzes, frames, and pictures for sale or hire. The two advertisement leaves at the end are given chiefly to a list, priced in plaster, carton-pierre, and bronze, of the sculptures the firm published, among them Antommarchi’s death mask of Napoleon. The copy that went to the Bibliothèque royale, of the same issue, keeps only its front wrapper, cut down and mounted on the board of a later cloth binding. The book did what the law intended. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim counted twenty-nine editions in six languages before the end of 1839. The preface to J. S. Memes’s English translation is dated London, 13 September, six days after the Paris demonstration; another London version was issued by McLean, a German one at Karlsruhe, and J. F. Frazer’s translation of the practical description appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute before the year was out. Giraldon told the court that autumn that the reprints alone had put nine thousand copies into circulation. Those who carried the process further worked from a text that had been made public in every particular. John William Draper, in New York, iodised his plates as it directs, tried both its baths and found the hyposulphite much the better, and in September 1840 published ‘On the Process of Daguerreotype, and its Application to Taking Portraits from the Life’ in the Philosophical Magazine. Hippolyte Fizeau added gold toning in the same year. Alfred Donné and Léon Foucault put the plate to the microscope for the atlas (1845) of Donné’s Cours de microscopie, its figures engraved after their daguerreotypes; and the daguerreotype of the Sun that Fizeau and Foucault took in a sixtieth of a second is dated 2 April 1845 in Arago’s Astronomie populaire. References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 183 (the edition with the portrait) — PMM 318b (the Giroux issue) — Norman 569 — Horblit 21a (the Lerebours and Susse issue) — En français dans le texte 255 — Sparrow, Milestones of Science 46 — Honeyman 802 — Bibliographie de la France, 14 September 1839, no. 4456 — Beaumont Newhall, ‘A Chronicle of the Birth of Photography,’ Harvard Library Bulletin 7 (1953), 208–220 — Pierre G. Harmant, ‘Daguerre’s Manual: A Bibliographical Enigma,’ History of Photography 1 (1977), 79–83 — Pierre G. Harmant and R. Derek Wood, ‘Daguerre’s Demonstrations in 1839 at the Palais d’Orsay,’ History of Photography 16 (1992), 400–401 — R. Derek Wood, ‘Ste Croix in London,’ History of Photography 17 (1993), 101–107 — R. Derek Wood, ‘A State Pension for L. J. M. Daguerre for the Secret of his Daguerreotype Technique,’ Annals of Science 54 (1997), 489–506 — Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (London, 1969), p. 71. 8vo (212 × 138 mm), π2 1–58, pp. [4], 79, [1, blank], with six engraved plates of the apparatus, numbered I–VI (plate II in the state with the caption ‘Coupe suivant la ligne A B.’ above the first figure), and two leaves of advertisements at the end. Half-title, with the publishers’ notice and the printer’s imprint on its verso; wood-engraved vignette of a fountain on the title, the table of contents on its verso. Original yellow printed wrappers, the upper cover with a wood-engraved vignette of a domed and porticoed building and the printed price, ‘Prix : 2 fr.’, the lower cover with the advertisement of the Maison Susse frères and the imprint of Béthune et Plon; untrimmed. Wrappers dust-soiled, the paper of the spine largely perished, the upper fore-corner of the front wrapper chipped, a tiny hole in the rear wrapper; half-title somewhat spotted, a faint damp-stain in the blank upper gutter of a few leaves, occasional very light dust-soiling. Unrestored. Modern slipcase.
Item #5602
Price: $145,000.00
