1502
in North America, this picture is lost and was probably
mediocre, but it testifi ed to the potential of the new
camera, which was and remains the duo’s main claim
to fame. “Wolcott’s camera” or the “mirror camera,”
as it came to be known after an improved version was
awarded the fi rst U.S. patent in photography in 1840,
was indeed revolutionary, in that it incorporated, in lieu
of a lens, a small concave refl ector at the back of the
box, which refl ected the light coming in through the
front opening onto a small plate (2 × 2½ inches) fastened
near the front and facing back. This crude design was
intended not only to palliate the cost of quality lenses,
but to maximize the amount of light reaching the plate,
so as to render portraits feasible by reducing exposure
times. Although the mirror design had the added (and
culturally more signifi cant) advantage of redressing the
lateral inversion of early daguerreotypes, augmenting
the available light was clearly the primary concern, as
was also the case in the sophisticated system of studio
lighting Wolcott invented by coupling mirrors outside
of the room’s bay windows, and in many other improve-
ments intended to produce more horizontal, more even,
or less brutal lighting. Indeed, the intensity of the light
concentrated on the sitter’s eyes was unbearable for any
length of time, which explains why the early portraits
produced by Wolcott’s camera were profi les, and why
various means were attempted to soften the impact. In
spite of this problem, the mirror camera was the principal
asset of the studio that the pair opened on Broadway in
March, 1840, probably the fi rst commercial daguerreo-
type portrait studio in the world, and one that presented
a remarkable internal architecture, embodying preco-
cious thinking on lighting and extending the structure
of the camera to the room’s organization. This was true
technical thinking on photography, and signifi cantly it
originated in a concern for the control of lighting in por-
traiture, thus departing from the abstract bend of many
early responses to the invention of photography. Thus, it
is inconsequential that Wolcott’s mirror design may have
been predated by earlier European publications on the
subject, as was in fact the case with some other methods
developed by the tandem, such as Wolcott’s “accelera-
tor,” a mixture of bromide and chloride for increasing
plate sensitivity. Whether or not they were aware of such
publications, Wolcott and Johnson were most effi cient
on a strictly technical level, for instance in developing
various methods of polishing silvered plates (by grinding
and, later, by buffi ng), which earned them a second U.S.
photographic patent in 1841. In this consistent effort to
make the daguerreotype a practical and artistic portrait
process, they contributed to an important pattern in the
U.S., where the application of ingenuity to the handling
of light, as well as the perfecting of daguerreotype plate
surfaces, were durable trends.
Similarly, the entrepreneurial drive of the pair was
precocious and characteristic, although their commer-
cial career was short-lived. Along with the New York
studio, the two associates created an establishment in
Washington, D.C. (where basic equipment was still very
scarce in the summer of 1840), and one in Baltimore.
More signifi cantly even, as early as February 1840, the
duo sent Johnson’s father to England to secure a pat-
ent for the mirror camera (which could only be done
by paying a fee to Daguerre’s agent) and to develop a
daguerreotype business in partnership with the inves-
tor Richard Beard, with whom they opened a studio in
London in March 1841. Although the Wolcott-Johnson
business in New York met with heavy competition and
indifferent success (the studio being sold in the fall of
1841), in London the Beard studio was for a time the
only one to compete with Antoine Claudet’s, and thanks
to the mirror camera it attracted a good deal of business
and attention in 1841–1842, while in other British cities
the Beard-Johnson partnership successfully operated
subsidiaries until 1843–1844, to the extent that the as-
sociates engaged in local factory production of mirror
cameras and polished plates. In fact, much of the pair’s
time was spent in England in the years 1841–1843,
and in March 1843 they obtained a British patent for
a method of copying and enlarging daguerreotypes,
while letters that were published later show that by 1843
Wolcott was working on a system of coating glass plates
with egg whites, subsequently hailed as a near-invention
of the albumen process. Had Wolcott not come to an
early death in 1844, he would likely have renounced his
mirror camera, which produced mediocre images and
painful effects on sitters, which never seriously threat-
ened the classic lens camera, and which was defi nitively
superseded after the new Petzval lens (coupled with a
prism that reversed the image) was introduced in 1843.
Nonetheless, its bold and simple design remains a major
example of American technical ingenuity in the era of
the “dag’type,” while the partners’ insistence on patent-
ing their improvements and expanding their business
announced the professional and commercial course of
19th-century American photography.
François BrunetBiography
Born in 1804 in Connecticut, Alexander Simon Wolcott
had, before 1839, been active as a mechanic in optics,
dentistry, and steam engines; in October 1839, he went
into partnership with John Johnson, who was born in
1813 in Maine and had previously been a “machin-
ist.” As early as October 6 or 7, Wolcott made the
fi rst daguerreotype portrait in the United States with a
prototype of the “mirror camera,” which was patented
on May 8, 1840 (U.S. patent #1,582), and put into
service on March 13, 1840, in a commercial studio on