The First Negatives

Résumé du livre

In 1937 the first negatives and thousands of the very earliest of photographs still lay virtually unseen for ninety years in a cupboard at Lacock Abbey. Later in that year Miss Matilda Talbot, C.B.E., grand-daughter of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative-positive photographic process, generously presented to the Science Museum much of this invaluable material together with some of her grandfather's apparatus, laboratory notebooks and letters. This monograph gives an opportunity for publishing a small selection of the photographs illustrating an account of the discovery and use of the calotype process, the first photographic process to utilize the chemical development of the latent image produced by briefly exposing silver salts to light. -- Introduction.