SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



Although a little later it was decided by a legal techni- 

 cality in a lawsuit that the patent rights of this process, 

 and therefore presumably the priority of discovery, be- 

 longed to Fox Talbot, there seems to have been another 

 and earlier discoverer of a "gallo-nitrate" process. 

 This was the Rev. J. B. Reade, a clergyman who had 

 become much interested in the new studies of light- 

 pictures. But the courts decided the case in favor of 

 Talbot on the ground that Reade's discovery had never 

 been legally published; and, all things considered, this 

 decision seems an eminently just one. For the gallo- 

 nitrate process as used by Reade, although an important 

 part of the Talbot process, was by no means the entire 

 calotype process as Talbot perfected it. And while 

 Reade's discovery may have helped Talbot, it was by no 

 means responsible for his final results. 



There is no reason to believe that Talbot ever at- 

 tempted to belittle the part taken by the clergyman in 

 the discovery of the gallo-nitrate process, for at that 

 time the name Fox Talbot was too well known in the 

 scientific world to need further advancement by claim- 

 ing the work of others. It may be recalled that it was 

 he who, with Rawlinson and others, helped to decipher 

 the Assyrian hieroglyphics a feat quite as wonderful 

 as were his discoveries in photography. 



Naturally, the thing most sought for in this new field 

 of art-science was some substance that would render 

 plates more sensitive, and, in 1841, an experimenter by 

 the name of Goddard made the discovery that bromine 

 vapor acted in this manner. In this same year, also, M. 

 Fizeau invented the process of toning or gilding photo- 



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