1146
Venice, where he worked as an optician, photographer
and publisher of photographic prints, but he never gave
up his Swiss citizenship. He soon became rich and
famous, and this led him to open branches of his fi rm
in Paris, London, Liverpool, Berlin, Stockard, Lyons,
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal,
and San Francisco. He showed his photographs and the
lenses and apparatuses he invented at the main exhibits
of the time: Venice 1854, Paris 1855, London 1862.
He became famous through his invention of a special
instrument for viewing enlarged photographic images,
the Aletoscopio, and he created various versions of it.
He published several catalogues of his images in 1855,
1864, 1866, and 1872. Ponti was a well-read, multifac-
eted personality, and was always interested in the latest
scientifi c and cultural developments of his time.
See also: Bresolin, Domenico; and Perini, Antonio.
Further Reading
Becchetti, Piero, Fotografi e fotografi a in Italia 1839–1880,
Rome, Quasar, 1978, 124–125.
Jauslin, Jean—Frédéric et al., Carlo Ponti. Un magicien de
l’image, Vevey, Musée suisse de l’appareil photographique,
1996 (exhibition catalogue).
Lawson, Julie, The Stones of Venice, Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, Edinburgh 1992 (exhibition catalogue).
Miraglia, Marina, “Note per una storia della fotografi a italiana
(1839–1911.,” In Storia dell’arte italiana, 473–474, Turin,
Einaudi, 1981..
Prandi, Alberto, “Carlo Ponti.” In Fotografia italiana
dell’Ottocento, edited by Marina Miraglia et al., 172–174.
Venice, Electa/ Alinari, 1979.
Verwiebe, Birgit, “L’illusione nel tempo e nello spazio. Il megale-
toscopio di Carlo Ponti, un apparecchio fotografi co degli anni
1860.” Fotologia, 16/17 (Autumn/Winter 1995): 53–61.
von Dewitz, Bodo, Siegert, Dietmar, and Karin Schuller-Procopo-
vici (eds.), Italien sehen und sterben. Photographien der zeit
des Risorgimento (1845–1870), 282–283, Heidelberg, Braus,
1994, (exhibition catalogue).
PONTON, MUNGO (1801–1880)
Inventor and polymath
The Scottish lawyer Mungo Ponton was the inventor of
a photographic process that was to lead to developments
that would have a huge impact on the visual culture of
the nineteenth century and beyond through the mechani-
cal reproduction of photographic images.
The announcements in January 1839 by Louis
Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot
of the discovery of photography created a ferment of
interest in Edinburgh, Ponton’s home-town. Edinburgh
had just gone through a period of intellectual promi-
nence, known as the Scottish Enlightenment, which
had seen a fl ourishing in the arts and sciences and many
gifted and able scientists were keen to experiment with
the new discovery. The meetings of the Society of Arts
for Scotland, which had been founded by Sir David
Brewster in 1821, was the forum for discussion of the
invention of photography in the months following the
announcements of Daguerre and Talbot.
Ponton had began experimenting with Talbot’s pro-
cess and this was when he made his remarkable discov-
ery, which he presented to a meeting of the Society of
Arts for Scotland on 29 May 1839. His paper was titled
“Notice of a cheap and simple method of preparing
paper for Photographic Drawing, in which the use of
any salt of silver is dispensed with.” What Ponton had
discovered was the light sensitive qualities of potassium
dichromate. This was to be the basis of many mechani-
cal means of the reproduction of photographs and of
producing permanent images.
Ponton had found that a piece of paper soaked in
potassium dichromate was sensitive to light and an
object place on the surface would leave an outline with
gradations of tone “according to the greater or less de-
gree of transparency in the different parts of the object.”
Fixing was simply a matter of washing in water when
those portions which had been acted on by the light
readily dissolved and those exposed were completely
fi xed. Ponton did acknowledge that the process was not
sensitive enough to be used in a camera.
It is not known if Ponton realised that the potassium
dichromate solution he was using was combining with
the gelatine used to size the paper to create the chemi-
cal reaction. However, of particular importance for the
development of Ponton’s process, and its use in future
printing techniques, was that he did not try to patent
his discovery but on the contrary made it available and
it was published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical
Journal in July 1839 and widely reproduced.
Those who experimented with Ponton’s discovery
included Talbot, Edmond Becquerel, Alphonse Louis
Poitevin and John Pouncy, who all took out patents
for the processes they developed. Talbot in particular
appreciated the important part played by gelatine.
Joseph Swan also patented his carbon process and
later recalled that his fi rst attempt at photography was
after reading about Ponton’s process in a weekly jour-
nal and that he was not slow to grasp the underlying
principle. In 1840, at the age of seventeen, M Carey
Lea, who was to become one of the leading American
photographic scientist in the nineteenth century, used
Ponton’s process to produce a series of photogenic
drawings. The album of these is in the Franklin Insti-
tute, Philadelphia.
Ponton deserves the accolade of a pioneer of pho-
tography although he left it to others to exploit the use
of potassium dichromate and the processes that were a