Photography, originsA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWup with Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), theatrical
designer and co-inventor of the diorama. Th e
death of Nièpce three years later left Daguerre
to lead the fi eld in France. He discovered that an
almost invisible latent image could be developed
using mercury vapour, thus reducing exposure
time from around 8 hours to between 20 and 30
minutes.
His daguerrotype was taken up by the
French government in 1839, and elicited from
Paul Delaroche the immortal line, ‘From today,
painting is dead!’ In the UK, astronomer Sir John
Herschel (1792–1871) read a paper entitled ‘On
the art of photography’ to the Royal Society,
accompanied by twenty-three photographs. In
1840 he was the fi rst to use the verb to photo-
graph and the adjective photographic, to identify
negative and positive, and twenty years later to
use the term snap-shot.
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) won
fame and fortune with his Calotype (1841), the
true technical base of photography because,
unlike the Daguerrotype, its negative/positive
principle made possible the making of prints
from the original photographs. Th e inventions
and discoveries that followed helped to improve
the eff ectiveness of the photographic process.
Frederick Scott Archer’s collodion or wet-plate
process, details of which were published in 1851,
greatly increased sensitivity; the use of gelatine
silver bromide emulsion, invented in 1871 by
Dr Richard Leach Maddox, and later improved
upon by John Burgess, Richard Kennett and
Charles Bennett, proved a considerable advance
on the collodion method, and ushered-in the
modern era of factory-produced photographic
material, freeing the photographer from the
necessity of preparing his/her own plates.
Celluloid was invented by Alexander Parkes
in 1861 and roll fi lm made from celluloid was
produced by the Eastman Company in the US
from 1889. By 1902, Eastman, manufacturers of
Kodak, were producing between 80 and 90 per
cent of the world’s output. Very swiftly photog-
raphy became the hobby of the man in the street.
Every tenth person in the UK – 4 million people- was estimated to own a camera by 1900.
Colour film photography hit many techni-
cal snags in its development. A colour screen
process was patented as early as 1904 by the
Lumière brothers. Th ey introduced their Auto-
chrome plates commercially in 1907, when good
panchromatic emulsion was available. However,
exposure was about forty times longer than that
for black and white fi lm.
Modern methods based on multiple-layer fi lm
Phatic language is central to human relation-
ships; its signifi cance can be best noted by its
absence: you give a cheery ‘hello’ to a friend
passing in the street, only to be greeted by stony
silence; you halt your car to permit another
motorist to go ahead of you, and he/she does
not acknowledge your gesture. From such phatic
neglect might spring responses out of all propor-
tion to the meaning of the exchange, or lack
of it. See jakobson’s model of communica-
tion.
Phoneme Th e smallest unit in the sound system
of a language. Each language can be shown
to operate with a relatively small number of
phonemes, some having as few as fi fteen, others
as many as fi fty. Phonemics is the study of the
basic sounds of language.
Phone-tapping See journalism: phone-
hacking; privacy.
Phonetics Th e science of human sound-making,
especially sounds used in speech. Phonetics
includes the study of articulation, acoustics
or perception of speech, and the properties of
specifi c languages.
Phonodisc First-ever video recording, devel-
oped by John Logie Baird (1888–1946) in 1928.
This was a 10-inch 78rpm record, in every
way similar to the acoustic discs already being
produced for conventional sound recording.
Despite its novelty, the Phonodisc, coming so
early in the age of the development of TV, failed
to succeed commercially.
Phonograph See gramophone.
Phonology A branch of linguistics which
studies the sound systems of languages. Its aim is
to demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sound
in spoken language, and to make as general
statements as possible about the nature of sound
systems in languages throughout the world.
Photographic negativization See visions of
order.
Photography, origins Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce
(1765–1833) and his brother Claude were the fi rst
to fi x images of the camera obscura by chemi-
cal means in 1793, though the light sensitivity
of silver nitrate had been known and written
about as early as 1727 when Johann Heinrich
Schulze, Professor of Anatomy at the University
of Altdorf, published a paper indicating that the
darkening of silver salts was due not to heat but
to light.
1826 is generally recognized as the year
in which the first photographic image was
captured. Joseph Nièpce’s reproduction of a
roof-top scene, on a pewter plate, he called
Heliographie – sun drawing. In 1830 he teamed