HF The History of Photography 600pág

340 The collodion period
Annan. Three different sizes of carbon prints were made, each in an edition of 1 ,ooo
copies, the largest size being 48 in. x 21-!- in.
The same year Swan sold the rights for Scotland to T. & R. ANN AN of Lenzie, near
Glasgow; for Germany to HANFSTAENGL of Munich ; and for France and Belgium to
ADOLPHE BRAUN of Dornach (Alsace). All three firms became world-renowned for
their carbon prints. Braun & Cie invested over £16,000 in the plant, which was
installed under Swan's supervision, and within twelve months this firm-which became
particularly famous for facsimiles of Old Master drawings, made by incorporating
red chalk, graphite, and other artist's pigments in the gelatine-had an output of
1,500 prints daily.15 The English patent rights were acquired by the AUTOTYPE
PRINTING & PUBLISHING co. in London, in January 1868.
The licence fee for professional photographers was £10 a year, but as the manipulation
was somewhat complicated, most photographers preferred to avail themselves
of the printing service provided by the Autotype Co. Charges ranged from Is. 6d. for
a whole-plate print, to 3s. 6d. for a I 5 in. x 12 in. print.
Both the carbon tissue and the first transfer paper were a commercial article in
many countries, and a large number of manuals in English, French, and German
followed the first in 1867, by George Wharton Simpson.
Further important simplifications in manipulation were introduced by]. R. Johnson
(1869) and ]. R. Sawyer (1874), both directors of the Autotype Co., and carbon
printing remained in favour well into the present century.
Photornezzotint. Apart from undertaking carbon printing for photographers and
publishers, the Autotype Co. themselves published facsimiles of drawings, engravings,
and reproductions of famous paintings. In spite of the name, there was nothing
automatic about the process, every print being made by hand. Swan did, however,
also patent a mechanical form of carbon printing in July 1865-photomezzotint. A
carbon print was electrotyped to form a copper mould in which coloured gelatine
reliefs were cast. This was very similar to Walter Woodbury's mechanical printing
method, and for this reason Woodbury offered Swan half his patent as an independent
inventor, suggesting that they should form a partnership to exploit both inventions.
The partnership was not concluded, but by a curious twist of fortune both
processes were in fact later acquired by the Photo Relief Company and still later, by
the Woodbury Permanent Photographic Printing Co.
Swan was a brilliant and prolific inventor. Though his international fame rests on
the incandescent electric light bulb, he was a pioneer in a number of photographic
fields throughout the evolution of photography in the nineteenth century-from the
manufacture of collodion to gelatine dry plates, bromide paper, nitro-cellulose films,
automatic plate-coating machines, and half-tone screens. The carbon process was
only the first of over sixty patents. 'There are no inventions without a pedigree',
Swan once remarked, and it is fitting that his first attempts in photography at the
early age of eleven or twelve were made with Mungo Ponton's bichromate process.
Seven months after Swan had patented his carbon process, w ALTER BENTLEY
WOODBURY took out a patent (23 September I 864) for photo relief printing, which
produced very similar permanent photographs.
Woodburytype. Woodburytype falls, strictly speaking, into the category of photomechanical
printing ; but being far more akin to carbon printing than to any other
process it seems to fit more naturally into this chapter. Unlike most other photomechanical
printing processes, W oodburytypes had true continuous half-tones and
to the untrained eye are indistinguishable from actual photographs-as are carbon
prints. Like them, they are mounted and not printed direct on the page, as are prints