M
879
MACFARLANE, SIR DONALD HORNE
(1830–1904)
The son of a magistrate in Caithness, where he was born
in July 1830, Macfarlane went to India in the late 1850s
as a partner in the fi rm of Begg, Dunlop and Co., agents
for tea and coal interests in the subcontinent. He appears
to have taken up photography as an amateur soon after
his arrival and the quality of his work attracted notice
when he joined the Bengal Photographic Society in
- He remained an active and enthusiastic member of
the society until his departure from India in 1864, win-
ning numerous medals in its competitions and contrib-
uting several papers to its journal. The most important
of these, Landscape photography in India, appeared in
September 1862 and from 1863–64 he served as the
society’s president. Macfarlane’s landscape work, small
in quantity in terms of known examples, nevertheless
refl ects one of the freshest and most individual responses
to the Indian landscape in the early 1860s and displays a
remarkably modern compositional approach. Although
Macfarlane continued with photography on his return
to Europe and had his work shown at the Paris Exhibi-
tion of 1867, examples of this have not so far come to
light: the scarcity of surviving prints has certainly led
to an unwarranted neglect of one of the most individual
photographic eyes in India in the 1860s. In his later
years he served as Member of Parliament for Carlow
(1880) and Argyllshire (1885, 1892), dying in London
on 2 June 1904.
John Falconer
MACH, ERNST (1838–1916)
Moravian physicist
From early in the second half of the nineteenth century,
photographers increasingly sought not just to decrease
exposure times, but to shorten them suffi ciently to be
able to capture moving subjects with the crispness and
full tonal range that was possible in a landscape view or
a studio portrait. Gustav le Gray, Count Michael Ester-
hazy, Albert Lugardon, Ottomar Anschütz, and others
achieved international recognition through their ability
to depict movements in “instantaneous” photographs
that recorded the natural motion of their subjects. The
most spectacular instantaneous photographs captured
movements too fast to be seen by the human eye,
such as bullets or cannon shells in fl ight, and melded
advanced photographic technology with a specialised
optical apparatus developed by the professor of physics
in Bonn, Dr. August Toepler, at the end of the 1850s and
published in 1864. Toepler was interested in observing
variations in the density of gases and fl uids, and devised
an apparatus where an “experimental space” containing
his transparent media was framed by two plano-convex
lenses on opposite sides, whose focal point was then
observed by a further pair of enlarging lenses. The
experimental space was lit from behind, and precisely
half of the rays of its lenses were blocked by a shutter
just at their focal point, in front of the observing lenses.
With this specialised setup, any variation in the refrac-
tion of light passing through the experimental space
caused by uneven density in the material showed up at
the observation point as an unfocussed streak of light,
and a Schlieren (“streak”) apparatus became a standard
laboratory instrument, not only for work on fl uids but
also for checking the imperfections of optical lenses.
When a camera replaced the human eye at the observa-
tion point, and an electric spark provided appropriate
illumination for a darkened experimental space, any
fast-moving object that passed through the space, and
the effects on the air caused by its movement, could
be photographed, measured, and studied, given that a
proper electrical circuit timed the release of the spark