HF The History of Photography 600pág

318 The collodion period
A few months before Herschel's letter to The Athenaeurn, a tiny photograph of a
page of The Illustrated London News made by ALFRED ROSLING attracted great attention
at the first photographic exhibition which was held at the Society of Arts in
December 18 52. When seen through a magnifying glass, the text could be read
without difficulty. In May 1853 the idea was further developed by J. B. DANCER of
Manchester, who produced the first microphotographs proper,20 of famous people,
paintings, scriptural texts, and a page of The Times, reduced to / 6
in. in diameter, and
taken on microscope slides, to be viewed in a powerful microscope.
GEORGE SHADBOLT independently started making microphotographs in March
18 54 and exhibited some at the London Photographic Society the following month.
By l 8 57 microphotographs were an article of commerce in England, the four leading
exponents in this field being Dancer, Shadbolt, Rosling, and Herbert Watkins, but
the fashion for them only began in February l 8 59, when newspapers and scientific
journals went into ecstasies over 'this new triumph in photography' -a portrait of
Charles Dickens 'so exquisitely minute that its beauty and fidelity are only discovered
by the use of a powerful microscope'. New microphotographic wonders (most of
them several years old) were written about almost every day, such as Dancer's pinhead
size photograph of the Ten Commandments containing l ,243 letters, a photographic
mosaic of l 5 5 portraits of eminent people, another with all the kings and
queens of England since Egbert. One of the attractions at the International Exhibition
in Paris, 1867, was a microphotograph by Prudent Dagron portraying all the 450
members of the Chamber of Deputies.
Queen Victoria, always eager for photographic novelties, wore a signet ring enclosing
a group of five portraits of her family, the whole picture (made by ]. B.
Dancer) measuring about t in. and magnified by a jewel lens. The Queen presented
gold and drop-pearl pendants, each containing a tiny photograph of Prince Albert,
to the Marchionesses of Ely and of Salisbury 'in remembrance of the best and greatest
of Princes, from his broken-hearted widow Victoria R. Dec. l 86r. '21 She herself
wore a bracelet with an enamel photograph of Prince Albert and in 1883, on the
death of her favourite attendant, John Brown, presented mourning tie-pins containing
his photograph.
SIR DA vrn BREWSTER first put forward the idea of setting microscopic photographs
in rings, brooches, tiepins, etc. When in Rome in 1857 he showed some of Dancer's
microphotographs, under thick piano-convex lenses (the so-called 'Stanhope' lenses)
to the Pope, Cardinal Antonelli, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Professor Amici, and
other important people, and suggested to a leading jeweller, F. Castellani, that they
should be incorporated in brooches, so that the photographs might be magnified by
one of the precious stones.22 Brewster repeated this suggestion in his article on the
microscope in the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in October 1857. In addition he
made the significant forecast that 'microscopic copies of dispatches and valuable
papers and plans might be transmitted by post, and secrets might be placed in a space
not larger than a full-stop or a small blot of ink'.
From England, the craze for microphotographs spread to France, where Prudent
Dagron patented their application to jewellery in May 1860, but owing to Brewster's
prior publication his patent was set aside at the application of fifteen Parisian opticians
who had found Bijoux photornicroscopiques a profitable novelty.
Miniature albums and tiny fans with i in. photographs were carried by fashionable
ladies. While these were made from carte-de-visite negatives greatly reduced, microphotographs
proper demanded scientific skill. A tiny positive, such as those just
described, was copied on albumenized glass through a l in. achromatic microscope