PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 

 OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. 



Vol. II. 



New York, February, 1895. 



No. 2. 



"THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY." 



By Prof. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, Ph.D., F. C. S. 



LIBRA 

 NEW Yi 

 BOTANI 



GAROI 



'"THE topic of my lecture this evening 

 * is one of my old hobbies, so that if 

 I am a little prolix sometimes you must 

 pardon me. It is something in which I 

 have been more or less interested for the 

 last twenty-five years, and, like most of 

 our hobbies, we sometimes drive them to 

 death, to the discomfort of other people. 



The fundamental ideas upon which 

 photography is based are very old — 

 older than the Christian era, certainly. 

 They depend upon two facts : First — 

 that light, in passing through a small 

 opening, produces an inverted image in 

 a dark chamber. Imagine, for instance, 

 that you are in a dark chamber, outside 

 of which is an object ; that there is in 

 the chamber a small hole a sixteenth or 

 an eighth of an. inch in diameter, and 

 that you have in this dark chamber a 

 piece of paper. Upon that paper you will 

 get a picture of the object opposite the 

 hole. That was known a long time ago. 

 The other fact is that certain salts of sil- 

 ver, notably the chloride, iodide and bro- 

 mide of silver, are sensitive to light and 

 become blackened by light, was known 

 to the Egyptians. The action of light 

 upon colored bodies must have been 



known to the very earliest observers 

 among men. The bronzing of the hu- 

 man skin under the tropical sun must 

 have been noted by every one ; and it is 

 on record, in the most ancient annals of 

 the human race, that men — the fair men 

 from the North — when they went to 

 the tropics, returned with tanned skins. 

 Ptolemy, over two thousand years ago, 

 noted that beeswax was bleached in sun- 

 light, and the old Greeks noted that the 

 gems which we call opal and amethyst 

 lost their colors when exposed to sun- 

 shine. These are some of the first and 

 most rudimentary notions upon the ac- 

 tions of light, and we have no definite 

 statements about making pictures with- 

 out light. The Chinese have a tradition 

 — and they have a great many curious 

 ones that are often founded on facts — 

 that the sun makes pictures upon the ii_e 

 of lakes and rivers. 



A Frenchman, named Fontamen, wrote 

 an imaginary voyage to a strange coun- 

 try, and among other things he said that 

 objects were reflected upon the water 

 and when the water was frozen the 

 images were retained. So this idea of 

 certain surfaces being capable of receiv- 



