Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1875 — Sun-Drawing. [ARTICLE]

Sun-Drawing.

With that proneness to go wrong which we notice in most things human and which crops out in science as well as elsewhere, the art of making pictures by the chemical action of radiant forces has got a false name. This is all the worse, as it was at first correctly designated, and that too by him who had the clearest right to give the process a title. Davy and Wedgewood early in the century had labored to produce sun-pictures by means of the camera-obscura, hut had met with little success. In 1814 M. Neipce, of Chalons, in France, took up the subject, and, in the course of ten years’ assiduous work, he succeeded in a method of forming sunpictures on chemically-prepared copper, pewter and glass plates, by which the lights, semi-tints and shadows were represented as in nature, and he also succeeded in making thp impressions lasting. In 1827 he sent a paper to the Royal Society accompanied with specimens; but, as he kept the process a secret, the communication could not be received. The process, however, lie named Heliography, or sun-drawing, a term by which it was truthfully characterized. M. Daguerre, another Frenchman, had been working at the same problem, and in 1829 thqse two men, with a common purpose, formed a partnership to carry on their researches jointly. Neipce died before the work was matured, and Daguerre, very naturally, reaped the honor of it. The French Government bought his secret, paying with a life pension and promulgating it to the world without restriction of patent in August, 1839. The new pictures were at once known as daguerreotypes, and the mode of making them the daguerreotype process. ThesQ uncouth terms endured for a while, h ut were at length supplanted by the word photography, or light-drawing , yyhich has become established. Yet the appellation is incorrect and the error is as broad as the difference between light and darkness. It is not light that makes the picture, but dark radiations that are associated with it and that have the peculiar effect of producing changes in certain chemical compounds.— “Chemical Radiations ,” in Popular Science Monthly. —lt costs less to take a good weekly paper than a diligent hen can «am in a year at tiie market price of eggs.