471
The membership of the Club was small with at least
seven principal members, mainly associated with the
legal profession, and a few others who were involved
from time to time, and one was a woman. The close
relationship between the Club and those active in pho-
tography at St Andrews persisted and in the two extant
albums of the Club there are prints by Dr John Adamson
and Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair. There are also prints by
Talbot and the most likely source for these would have
been Brewster.
The known members of the Club are: John Cay
(1790–1865), advocate and Sheriff of Linlithgow; Cos-
mo Innes (1798–1874), advocate and Sheriff of Moray;
George Moir (1800–1870), advocate and Sheriff of Ross;
James Francis Montgomery (1818–1897), advocate and
later a clergyman; Mark Napier (1798–1879), advocate
and Sheriff of Dumfries; John Stewart (1813–1867),
estate owner; and Hugh Lyon Tennent (1817–1874),
advocate. Associated with the Club were: Sir James
Dunlop (1830–1858), student and later soldier; his aunt,
Mrs Frances Monteith (1805–1898) who was the wife
of Alexander Earle Monteith and advocate and Sheriff
of Fife; James Calder Macphail (1820–1908), Free
Church divinity student and clergyman; and Robert
Tennent (1813–1890) brother of Hugh and owner of
land in Australia.
The two known albums of photographs by the Club
members and their associates are in Edinburgh. The one
in the Edinburgh Central Library belonged to James
Francis Montgomery and was acquired from his de-
scendants in 1952. The other is in the National Library
of Scotland and was bought at auction in 2001. This is
accompanied by an index which has thrown new light on
the Club as it gives a description of the images and has
a key for the initials that appear beside most of the pho-
tographs giving the names of the photographers. There
was at least one other album as Gray mentions seeing
an album with photographs of places which are not in
either of the known albums. The photographs by Mrs
Frances Dunlop, which include her nephew Sir James
Dunlop, are in an album which belonged to Brewster
that is now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.
In its loose arrangement the Club survived until 1856
when its members were largely responsible for founding
the Photographic Society of Scotland. At the meeting
held to consider forming the Photographic Society of
Scotland in March 1856, the motion to do so was moved
by Cosmo Innes and seconded by George Moir. At the
Society’s fi rst exhibition later that year Innes exhibited
several of his prints by the calotype process.
Roddy Simpson
See also: Amateur Photographers, Camera Clubs,
and Societies; Brewster, Sir David; Calotype and
Talbotype; Dunlop, Sir James; Innes, Cosmo;Adamson, John, Talbot, William Henry Fox; and
Salted Paper Print.Further Reading
D. O. Hill and R. Adamson, Calotypes, Selected from his Collec-
tion by Andrew Elliot, text by John Miller Gray and others,
Edinburgh, 1928.
Smith, Graham, Disciples of Light, The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Malibu, 1990.
The British Journal of Photography, 14 August 1874.EDISON, THOMAS ALVA (1847–1931)
American inventor, manufacturer, and cultural icon
The development of a celluloid fi lm band 1^3 ⁄ 8 inches wide
for the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewer of
Thomas Edison, developed at his laboratory in West
Orange, New Jersey, by a team led by William Kennedy
Laurie Dickson, is Edison’s lasting contribution to the
worlds of both moving pictures and photography. Later
known by its metric equivalent as 35mm fi lm, Edison’s
chosen format of 1894 is still the principal moving pic-
ture fi lm width after 108 years, and became an ubiqui-
tous format for still photography beginning in the 1930s
with the introduction of lightweight single-lens-refl ex
cameras. The width of this fi lm, and its four perforations
per image on both sides of the band, have been virtu-
ally unaltered since late 1891, and as early as 1897 this
size of moving picture fi lm was referred to as “standard
fi lm” or “Edison standard fi lm,” even as numerous other
formats competed in a still-fl uid marketplace. As Paul
Spehr has carefully documented (see Further Reading,
below), Edison’s work on “an instrument which does for
the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear,” as the in-
ventor expressed it in a Caveat fi led with the U. S. Patent
Bureau in 1888, moved through a series of stages: sheet
celluloid wrapped around a cylinder, celluloid plates
mounted around the edge of a revolving disk, 22mm
fi lm perforated on one side running horizontally in the
camera, and 1 inch fi lm perforated on both sides running
vertically in the camera, which was fi nally resolved as a
thicker 1^3 ⁄ 8 inch wide band. In developing their moving
picture system and its photographic celluloid, Edison
and Dickson had the advantage of working in a unique
and intimate relationship with George Eastman and his
colleagues in Rochester, New York; no other moving
picture pioneer commanded such industrial respect
that a major photographic supplies fi rm entered into
the kind of intimate and arduous partnership shared by
Edison and Eastman that was necessary to develop a
new photographic material.
From their earliest experiments in moving pictures,
Edison and Dickson used transparent celluloid covered
on one side with a photographically sensitive emulsion.EDISON, THOMAS ALVA
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