REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1914. 63 
Museum, and has ever since remained strictly in his charge as cus- 
todian of the section pertaining to this subject. So unostentatiously 
have his labors in seeking original pieces of apparatus from the 
earliest dates and examples of the results of the various processes 
been carried on, that only recently has the Museum itself come to 
fully realize the importance of his efforts. The collection brought 
together is without a parallel and so well is nearly every step shown 
that it furnishes an excellent basis for an historical account of this 
interesting art, on which the world now chiefly depends for illus- 
trative purposes. To the public at large, and even the casual visitor, 
it has likewise a great attraction at this period when the camera is 
so universally in vogue. The installation, begun about a year before, 
was sufficiently advanced to be opened to the public late in June, 
1913, but additions have since been made, and others are soon to be 
expected. 
The exhibition of photography occupies the gallery of the north- 
west court, which has a total length on its four sides combined of 
209 feet 10 inches, and a width of 10 feet 3 inches. The north, west, 
and south sides are provided with a continuous deep wall case, but 
on. the east side, where the large arched openings between the piers, 
overlooking the north hall, have not been closed, the cases are of 
several floor patterns, the American, the half-unit slope top, and the 
flat top. Elsewhere a number of floor cases of different kinds have 
been placed alongside the outer railing. The light, which comes 
from a skylight and clerestory windows, is entirely suitable. The 
labels, though prepared, had not been printed at the close of the 
year. They comprise individual labels for the objects, general labels 
for the sections, and very full descriptive labels for the cases. 
The gallery is entered from the rotunda at the southeast corner 
where the earliest objects are first encountered on the right. Thence 
the order of arrangement is along the east, north, west, and south 
sides to the point of starting. The collection begins with the camera 
obscura, and in the several separate cases on the east side is extended 
through quite a number of the early stages of photography. The 
camera obscura, known to Euclid in a primitive form 300 years B. C., 
was first used in photography by Thomas Wedgwood in 1802, 
though experiments made in the eighteenth century tended in this 
direction. Wedgwood produced silhouettes in white on a black 
ground by the use of paper sensitized with a solution of silver nitrate, 
and also obtained photographs of leaves, wings of insects, and other 
objects on paper and leather sensitized in the same manner, but, as 
no solvent had been discovered for the silver salts which remain 
unaltered by light, these photographs all faded. The exhibit com- 
prises a photograph of an engraving of the camera obscura as used 
in the sixteenth century, a model of a camera obscura as improved 
in 1875, and examples of the work of Wedgwood. 
