Episode Details

1850 DAGUERREO INVENTER OF (PHOTO:  )GRAPHY DAGUERREOTYPE
Early Photography Transforms Science And Society
Anika Burgess, author of Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History, chronicles the visionary experimenters who pioneered nineteenth-century photography. Beginning with Louis Daguerre’s 1839 daguerreotype and Nadar’s aerial balloon exploits, she details technological breakthroughs including the wet collodion process, glass negatives, and volatile chemical compounds like cyanide and gun cotton. Burgess highlights how early photography transformed scientific inquiry through lunar imaging, Louis Boutan’s underwater photography, and Wilhelm Röntgen’s X-rays. Furthermore, she explores photography’s social impact, citing Jacob Riis’s tenement flash photography, Carleton Watkins’s Yosemite conservation landscapes, and Eadweard Muybridge’s high-speed motion studies, which ultimately catalyzed the birth of motion pictures. (1)