Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 127, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1911 — FIRST TO PHOTOGRAPH HUMAN FACE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FIRST TO PHOTOGRAPH HUMAN FACE

IN the old building of the New York university on Washington square, the birthplace of the telegraph of Morse, there waß taken in 1839 the first photograph Of the human face. The photograph w&b that of Miss Dorothy Catherine Draper, and the man who took it was her brother, Dr. John William Draper, professor of chemistry in the university. He gone a step beyond Daguerre and by thjs photograph he established himself as one of The great inventors of the nineteenth century. Not long a£o occurred the hundredth anniversary of Doctor Draper’s birth and it was celebrated in the auditorium of the university at Aqueduct avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-first street. It was on the roof of the old building on Washington place that there was set up, in 1840, the first photograph gallery in the world. To this gallery there came to be amazed and delighted all the notables of the day, including Theodore Frelinghuysen, the candidate for vice-president on the Henry Clay ticket Professor Draper took the pictures. His camera was a cigar box and his lense the glass from a pair of spectacles. Doctor Draper’s assistant in this gallery, the man who posed the sitters and attended to the artistic details, was Prof. 8. 7. B. Morse, who only five years before and in the same building had operated the first telegraph line. The pictures taken in this gallery were developed by Professor Draper, for It was his experiments in regard to the chemical action of light that had enabled him to Improve the process of Daguerre almost as soon as the latter’s discovery was made known. It was in 1839 that Daguerre gave his process to the world, but It was not then adaptable to landscapes or portraits. In the same year Professor Draper announced that he had found the way to photograph the human face and to overcome those obstacles which made the Frenchman’s process imperfect and impractical. In these kodak days the directions which Doctor Draper gave at this time for taking a photograph are interesting. At first, he said, he had tried dusting the face of a sister with white powder, but he later found that this was unnecessary. On a bright day and with a sensitive plate, he announced, portraits could be obtained in the course of five or seven minutes. “The hands of the sitter,” he said in these directions to the camera fiends of that day, “should never rest upon the chest, for the motion of respiration disturbs them so much as to make them of a thick and clumsy appearance, destroying also the representation of the veins on the back, which, if they are held motionless, are copied with surprising beauty. “A person dressed in a black coat and open waistcoat of the same color must put on a temporary front of a drab or flesh color or by the time that his face and the fine shadows of his woolen clothing are evolved his shirt will be solarized and will be blue and black with a white halo around It. “Owing to the circumstances that yellow and yellowish browns require a long time to impress the substance of the daguerrqtype, persons whose faces are freckled all over give rise to the most ludicrous results, a white portrait mottled with Juat as many black dots as the sitter has yellow ones.”

On March 22, 1840, Doctor Draper took from the roof of the-building the first photograph ever'taken of. the moon. His plate was exposed 20 minutes and the Image *as about an inch ih diameter. The photograph was presented to what was then the Lyceum of Natural History. It created a great sensation at the time, not only here but abroad. Daguerre’s name was

given to the photographic process for many years after this. The man whom New York university is about to honor as the first photographer and a great chemist was born an Englishman. He came to this country at the age of twenty-two, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1836 and was appointed professor of natural philosophy, chemistry and physiology at Hamp-den-Sydney college in Virginia. It was from there that he was called in 1839 to be professor of chemistry at New York university, and he signalized his change of residence by announcing almost Immediately thereafter his photographic process. He was connected with the university until his death in 1882. Doctor Draper has frequently been described as a pioneer in the science of prismatic analysis. His discoveries In this field covered a wide range. He even anticipated the incandescent light of Edison when he suggested as- a standard for photometry for white light a piece of platinum foil of given area and thickness heated to Incandescent by an electric current of specified strength. t Gapillai'y attraction was the subject of his first researches and from them arose his discovery as to how the blood is purified, a mystery which had baffled the scientists up to that time. It was in 1847 that he explained the circulation and purification of the blood in a work that attracted wideattention. Doctor Draper is still, remembered at New York university as one of the moat prodigious workers ever known. Besides his extensive research work he found time -to publish more than a hundred books, monographs and addresses. He wrote a history of the Civil war in three volumes and his "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe" was translated into every civilized tongue.