1390
to 20,000 sq ft and employed 250 employees in the
pre-1914 period. The company mass-produced a range
of cameras from traditional mahogany fi eld cameras
to amateur hand, box and folding cameras and, from
1908, refl ex cameras. During the war it developed aerial
cameras for the government but after 1918 it failed to
innovate its consumer and professional products and
despite attempting diversifi cation into toys in the 1920s
with Picabrix it gradually declined as a photographic
manufacturer. TP ceased trading in 1959 by which time
it was only undertaking photographic repairs.
After 1898 Thornton continued to patent a range of
devices relating to photography and other subjects and
he tried, unsuccessfully to expand into fi lm production
and undertook other business ventures before he moved
to the United States. He seems to have had some success
with cinematography and was earning royalties from
Kodak during the 1920s.
Thornton returned to Britain and died on 5 October
1940 forgotten by the photographic industry that he had
been part of fi fty years previously.
Michael Pritchard
Further Reading
Douglas Rendell, The Thornton-Pickard Story, Prudhoe, Photo-
graphic Collectors Club of Great Britain, 1992, from a series
of fi ve articles originally published in the British Journal of
Photography between December 16, 1983, and January 13,
1984.
TILBROOK, HENRY HAMMOND
(1848–1937)
Tilbrook was born in Llandudno, Wales, and arrived in
Adelaide, South Australia, with his family aboard the
Albermarle in 1854. He worked as a compositor for
the Register newspaper and after other work including
a stint in New Zealand looking for gold he established
the Northern Argus newspaper in Clare in 1870. He
became a keen amateur photographer in the dry plate
era, making numerous trips into the surrounding coun-
tryside and beyond. After retiring in 1891 he moved to
East Adelaide and he made a number of lengthy pho-
tographic (and hunting) excursions including visits to
the Flinders Ranges in 1894, Mount Gambier in 1898,
Mount Bryan in 1899, Mount Gambier to Robe in 1900
and Mount Gambier and Portland, Victoria in 1905. He
created albums of prints, stereoviews and enlargements
but did not make a commercial venture of this although
some of his enlargements were supplied to the Railways
Dept to decorate train carriages in 1901. Tilbrook made
detailed notes of his travels in diaries and a collection
of his photographs and glass negatives was acquired by
photographic historian R. J. (Bob) Noye and is now in
the State Gallery of South Australia. An exhibition of
his work was held there in 2001.
Marcel SafierTINTYPE (FERROTYPE,
MELAINOTYPE)
A process fi rst introduced in the mid-1850s, the collo-
dion and later gelatin-based images on thin metal sheets
were customarily sent through the mail to sweethearts
and family. Though popularly called “tintypes,” they
were never made of tin. Tintypes have been produced in
the studio, by itinerant photographers and by the general
amateur. Tintypes became the vacationers’ keepsake,
the Sunday strollers’ memento. Ironically, the tintype,
which so permeated the lower working class of society,
rarely outlined its social problems and other struggles.
Rather the tintype image, largely through the use of
studio props, created an ersatz lifestyle and does little to
further our understanding of the working-class life. This
suggests that it is wise to remember that photographs
cannot stand alone as interpretative statements about the
past, any more than can other primary sources.
The tintype was immensely popular in North America
from late-1850s onward and, to a much lesser degree in
Europe and elsewhere. The use of collodion chemistry
eventually gave way to gelatin emulsion manufacture
by the early-1890s. This genre survives even today and
noticeably practised by street photographers in Central
and South America and India.
Ferrotypy is the proper technical name for the process.
The words “ferrotype” and “tintype” are often used in-
terchangeably to describe the light-sensitive plates, and
“tintypist” to describe the photographer. These and other
terms proliferated throughout the popular language and in
commercial and technical publications (see Appendix).
The tintype was the particular application of Fred-
erick Scott Archer’s wet-collodion process. A japanned
(i.e., blackened) sheet of thin iron was substituted for the
ambrotype’s glass support. The plates were coated with
collodion, quickly sensitized and immediately exposed
in the conventiona “wet plate” manner. The “tintypist”
would develop and fi x the plate, and cut it apart with tin
shears. Formats ranged from postage-stamp size “gem”
tintypes (approximately 1.5 × 2 cm) to the large “double
whole” plates (21.5 × 33 cm). (Though technically
inaccurate to classify a tintype by “plate” dimensions,
popular nomenclature prevails.) Tintypists enhanced the
image by applying assorted water- or oil-based colours
and protective shellacs to its surface.Collodion Ferrotypy
By 1853 Parisian college professor Adolphe Alexandre
Martin presented to the Société d’Encouragement and to