56
quality never before seen. By printing the new negatives
on albumen paper new aesthetic possibilities and practi-
cal applications for photography were opened up.
Archer gained permission to show a few of his col-
lodion negatives which were displayed to acclaim a few
days before the closing of the 1851 Exhibition at the
Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London (The Photographic
Journal, 1862, 149). Horne, Thornthwaite and Wood,
opticians and philosophical instrument makers of Lon-
don, arranged with Archer to sell his iodized collodion
and took out newspaper advertisements in the autumn of
- Despite demand from other opticians and chem-
ists Horne and Thornthwaite continued to be the sole
distributor for several months. That same year an early
enthusiast for Archer’s process, Robert J. Bingham,
photographed the prize winning exhibits of the Paris
Industrial Exhibition to produce some 2500 collodion
negatives in a comparatively short time. This convinced
many other photographers of the practical viability of
collodion beyond doubt despite the cumbersome equip-
ment required for exposing the wet plates and develop-
ing them on location. Collodion photography gradually
displaced most other processes and was prevalent from
around 1855 to 1881 when it was superseded by the
more convenient gelatin dry plates.
The widespread use of the wet collodion process
can also be attributed to the fact that Archer did not
patent his invention but shared his fi ndings with fellow
photographers and published it freely with no profi t
to himself. By contrast, throughout the 1840s and the
early 1850s, Talbot maintained a stronghold over the
licence of his calotype process and threatened legal ac-
tion against those who breached his copyright. Martin
Silvester Laroche refused to pay a license after Talbot
challenged him which led to the court case of Talbot V.
Laroche in 1854. In the case Talbot claimed that Archer’s
wet collodion method, being essentially a negative /
positive process like his own, came under his 1843
calotype patent. The verdict was that although Talbot
should be recognised as the inventor of the negative /
positive process Archer’s discovery was not covered by
the calotype patent and thus free for all to use without
restriction.
However, there were suggestions that Archer was
not the only inventor to have come up with the idea of
using collodion on glass. Bingham claimed that ‘In a
pamphlet on photography, which I published in London
in January, 1850, I mentioned the employment of col-
lodion in photography, and communicated the secret of
this discovery to the most distinguished photographers
of London’ (The Chemist, July 1852, vol.3, no.34, 458).
Archer did not dispute that others had suggested the
possible use of collodion before him but he claimed
priority to the publication of its practical application. In
Notes and Queries, (1852 vol. vi, 612) Archer responded
to a correspondent who ascribed the discovery of the
collodion process to Gustave Le Gray:
I was certainly the fi rst who published the mode of using it,
and gave the required proportions of the various chemicals
necessary in the process. I have been repeatedly advised
to advertise it as the Archerotype, but I was unwilling to
do so, not because I doubted my right to the name, but I
was satisfi ed with the general recognition of my claims,
and left others to name it for me. Had I done it myself at
once, the invention at this late hour would not have been
claimed by another.
Archer was usually unassertive about his invention
because he was a shy man. His character is described
in The British Journal of Photography (5 February,
1875, 65) by a contemporary, John Beattie, a Bristol
daguerreotypist who visited him in 1851 to enquire
about the collodion process:
Having got Mr. Archer’s address, without any introduc-
tion but the simple plea of my curiosity and desire for
knowledge, I called upon him. ... I met a thin, pale-
faced, over-thoughtful man, possessing a manner so free,
unsuspicious, and gentle, that in a few minutes all idea
of my being and intruder was entirely removed. ... He
was profuse in description (as if I had paid him a fee) and
ended with the words, ‘Perhaps you would like to see me
make a picture?’ ... But Mr. Archer’s generosity did not
end there. He wrote me a list of chemicals which I was
to procure, and told me to use his name at Horne and
Thornthwaite’s ... He shook me by the hand as warmly
as if I had been obliging him.
Archer chose to demonstrate the powers of the wet
collodion process himself with images made in 1851
of the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, near Warwick in
central England. Its red sandstone remains date from
the various periods in its history from the twelfth to the
sixteenth century. It was depicted by the watercolour
artists of the late 18th and early 19th century such as
Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner and Peter De Wint who
pointed the way to such suitable subjects for the new
art of photography. Walter Scott found inspiration in
the castle for his popular novel Kenilworth (1821). It
was therefore an evocative location well known to the
Victorian public for its romantic, medieval associations.
The young Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett
Millais, and those associated with the movement such
as John Inchbold, concentrated on paintings of minute
detail in the early 1850s of vegetation encroaching on
ruins. It is interesting to note that these artists’ tastes
for meticulous, lifelike observations corresponded with
the exactitude that Archer’s wet collodion negatives
likewise allowed. His images of the castle are among
the earliest photographs of the genre of ruined buildings
that continued to be a popular subject for photographers
throughout the 1850s and 60s.
Archer exhibited work in the fi rst exhibition de-