HF The History of Photography 600pág

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The early years of photography
Worked off in celestial and strange mezzotint
A little resembling an elderly print.
'Well, I never!' all cry ; 'it is cruelly like you !'
But Truth is unpleasant
To prince and to peasant.
You recollect Lawrence, and think of the graces
That Chalon and Company give to their faces;
The face you have worn fifty years doesn't strike you!
Excited though the crowds were, Beard was still more so. Business was beyond his
wildest dreams; the average takings each day are said to have amounted to something
like £150.26 This figure, however, in all probability refers only to the enthusiastic
onrush of the first few months, when a daguerreotype portrait was a great
novelty, for N. P. Lerebours in November 1841 remarked27 that the receipts at
Beard's and Claudet's establishments in the early days 'several times amounted to
£60 in one day'. Whatever the exact amount, the takings were undoubtedly very
high, and Beard, realizing the fortune that lay within his grasp if he could secure a
monopoly in photographing 'the human face divine', on 23 June 1841 purchased
from Miles Berry the whole of the daguerreotype patent for £800, thus becoming
the sole patentee in England, Wales, and the Colonies. £800 for the right to hold a
monopoly of the daguerreotype for the remaining twelve years of the patent seems
a trifling sum when we remember that only the year before Daguerre had expected
to obtain five times that amount, and considering that Beard had paid over £7,000
for the right to use Wolcott's camera, which was in fact abandoned within only
two years.
In accordance with the arrangement made between Daguerre and Claudet in 1839,
the patent was first offered to Claudet, but he could not afford it, and his partner,
sceptical about the value of the investment, could not be persuaded to finance the
project. In the years to follow, George Houghton must have greatly regretted his
decision, for Beard is said to have taken between £25,00028 and £36,00029 in the
second business year alone from the sale of licences and fees from his professional
studios.
Since the summer of 1840 Claudet, like Beard, had busied himself trying to find
a means of accelerating the daguerreotype process; but, unable to avail himself of
either Wolcott's camera or Goddard's accelerator bromine, Claudet found a solution
to the problem only two months after Beard had started business. It was in May 1841
that he made the discovery that a combination of chlorine and iodine vapour greatly
increased the sensitivity of the plate. He communicated this accelerating process to
the Royal Society on IO June, a report to the Academie des Sciences in Paris having
been read three days earlier.30 The exposure was comparable with Beard's, varying
between IO seconds and 2 minutes according to the strength of the sunlight, the time
of day, and the season of the year. It is astonishing how greatly the exposure varied
from month to month : 'In June I operated in l