1136
States included JC Millen of Denver, Colorado, E and
HT Anthony of New York, and the American Aristotype
Company of Jamestown.
As a consequence of the “platinum famine” brought
on by the Russian Revolution and the Great War, the
Platinotype Company had to diversify its products,
introducing as substitutes “Satista” paper in 1913, and
“Palladiotype” paper in 1917. On the death of William
Willis in 1923, the Company passed to his younger
brother, John, and was subsequently headed by a cousin,
Alfred Willis Clemens, until 1937, when the Company
was voluntarily dissolved.
Mike Ware
See also: Platinum Print; Willis, William; and
Bromide Print.
Further Reading
Abney, William de Wiveleslie, and Clark, Lyonel, Platinotype,
its Preparation and Manipulation, London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1895.
Child Bayley, R, The Complete Photographer, London: Methuen,
1932.
Cottington, Ian, “Platinum and Early Photography.” Platinum
Metals Review, 28/4, 1984, 178–188; and in History of Pho-
tography, 10/2, 1986, 131–139.
Hinton, Alfred Horsley, Platinotype Printing, London: Hazell,
Watson, and Viney, 1897
Levenson, Gerald, “Herbert B. Berkeley and the Sulphited De-
veloper.” The Journal of Photographic Science, 34/1, 1986,
34–40.
Nadeau, Luis, History and Practice of Platinum Printing, Freder-
icton, New Brunswick: Atelier Luis Nadeau, 3rd edn. 1994
Tennant, John (ed.), The Photo-miniature, “Platinotype Pro-
cesses,” 1/7, October 1899, 318[–]355; “Platinotype Modi-
fi cations,” 4/40, July 1902, 153–193; “Platinum Printing,”
10/115, May 1911, 305–342.
Ware, Mike, “The Eighth Metal: the Rise of the Platinotype
Process.”In Photography 1900: The Edinburgh Symposium,
edited by Julie Lawson, Ray McKenzie, and Alison Morrison-
Low, Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland and National
Galleries of Scotland, 1993.
Willis, William, British Patents, nos. 2011, 5 June 1873; 2800,
12 July 1878; 1117, 15 March 1880; 1681, 2 February 1887;
16003, 21 November 1887.
——, et al., in The British Journal of Photography, 24, 1877,
172–173; 25, 1878, 25, 400, 605; 26, 1879, 73–74, 340; 27,
1880, 232–233, 399–400; 28, 1881, 43, 64, 474; 34, 1887,
101; 35, 1888, 778
——, “Recent Improvements in Platinotype.” The Journal of the
Camera Club, 2, 1888, 47–]0, 99, 103; 4, 1890, 121; 6, 1892,
53–55; 7, 1893, 170–173.
PLATINUM PRINT
From the earliest days of photography, the noble metal
platinum was recognised as a potential image substance.
Both Sir John Herschel in 1839, and Robert Hunt in
the 1840s, sought to employ platinic salts photochemi-
cally, but found no real success. Printing in platinum
did not show any promise until 1873 when, in search
of a greater permanence than silver afforded, William
Willis junior, of Bromley, Kent, turned to experiment-
ing with the little-known platinous—as opposed to
platinic—salts. Progress did not prove easy, however:
to achieve satisfactory quality, Willis had to include
salts of silver, lead, and even gold in his sensitizers.
Such uncertain mixtures won little attention for his
processes at fi rst. In the struggle to fulfi l his original
concept, Willis’s endeavours spanned twenty years of
research, producing fi ve British patents. By 1878 he had
succeeded in eliminating the silver from his sensitizer,
which emboldened him to found the Platinotype Com-
pany to market his platinotype paper, but its processing
called for a scaldingly-hot, poisonous, developing bath,
which had little appeal.
By the mid-1880s Willis was facing competition
from Giuseppe Pizzighelli and Baron Arthur von Hübl
in Austria, who devised a printing-out platinum paper in- The photographic press praised Willis’s paper in
1888, but it was not until 1892 that he fi nally perfected
the process with his “cold development” paper, which
was instantly acclaimed, ensuring that his product
enjoyed much wider use. By the close of the century,
more platinotypes could be seen on the salon walls
than any other print medium: the process had achieved
pre-eminence.
Platinotype is a later addition to the group of iron-
based photographic printing processes, whose prin-
ciples were discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842,
using ammonium ferric citrate. Platinotype differs in
requiring ferric oxalate, which is decomposed by light
to insoluble ferrous oxalate, as fi rst noted by Johann
Wolfgang Döbereiner in 1831. At this stage, the image
is faintly visible, partially printed-out in pale buff on a
yellow ground. It further requires development in a bath
of hot (80 ̊C), strong (30 per cent) potassium oxalate
solution to solubilise the ferrous oxalate, which can then
reduce the platinous salt, included as potassium chlo-
roplatinite, to platinum metal in a fi nely-divided state
known as “platinum black.” These two reactions may be
represented by the following chemical equations:
ILLUSTRATION
UV light + Fe 2 (C 2 O 4 ) 3 —> 2FeC 2 O 4 + 2CO 2
UV light + ferric oxalate —> ferrous oxalate + carbon
dioxide
2FeC 2 O 4 + 4K 2 C 2 O 4 + K 2 PtCl 4 —> 2K 3 Fe(C 2 O 4 ) 3 +
4KCl + Pt
ferrous + potassium + potassium —> potassium + po-
tassium + platinum
oxalate oxalate chloroplatinite ferrioxalate chlo-
ride metal
To clear the print, all the residual chemicals are removed
by three successive baths of very dilute hydrochloric