1475
provement over photo-collotype because it had greater
resistance to variations in temperature and humidity,
and could make far more impressions.
He became an authority on photography under tropi-
cal conditions, making numerous chemical trials using
ingredients available locally. After confi rming Vogel’s
1873 fi nding that the sensitivity of plates to red and
green could be enhanced, he examined the effi cacy of
other dyes, notably eosine, which in 1875 he discovered
had the effect of increasing the sensitivity of haloid salts
of silver to yellow light. In his presidential review for
the Asiatic Society of Bengal in February 1889 he was
able to outline the usefulness of eosine in preparing
orthochromatic plates for use in copying paintings and
photo-spectroscopy. That year he also established the
effect of alizarine blue in increasing the sensitiveness of
gelatine dry plates to the red end of the spectrum.
As well as his scientifi c studies, Waterhouse under-
took three trips around central India in 1862 during
which he took large quantities of photographs under
diffi cult conditions for the pioneering ethnographic
study The People of India, published in eight volumes
between 1868 and 1875. He participated in the observa-
tions of the total solar eclipses of 1871 and 1875. For the
observation of the transit of Venus in 1874 he took 100
photographs at Roorkee in India, and was fortunate to
take the only sharp image of all the expeditions.
In 1875 he published the results of experiments on the
solar spectrum using an aniline blue dye he had obtained
from a local market. This enabled him to record lines in
the solar spectrum less refrangible than A, but reversed:
absorption lines appeared opaque on the transparent
body of the spectrum instead of the normal transparent
on an opaque body. He amplifi ed these fi ndings in a
paper read to the Royal Photographic Society (RPS)
in 1898 in which he noted that the degree of reversal
tended to be a function of length of exposure and varied
according to the stain used.
In 1890 Waterhouse found that adding thiourea to an
alkaline developer caused a reversal of the image on dry
plates but without a signifi cant increase in the length of
exposure, and in the same year he examined guaiacol as
a cheaper alternative to catechol as a developer for dry
plates. The following year he examined the generation
of electrical current during development of gelatine
dry plates. He returned to guaiacol in 1893, reporting
on chemical analyses of it and allied phenoloid com-
pounds, and in an addendum noted that the Lumières in
Lyon had found that guiaicol in its pure form was not a
developer, and that any developing action was caused
by impurities. He followed up a paper by the Lumères
in 1899 on the effi cacy of fatty amines as accelerating
agents, establishing that dipropylamine was the best but
of limited practical benefi t because of its price.
In 1893 he published a paper on the effect of light on
silver salts and devoted the 1899 Traill Taylor Memorial
Lecture to an analysis of the daguerreotype process and
the lessons it held concerning the action of light on silver
haloid compounds. The theme was continued in a paper
he presented to The Royal Society the following year
on the degrees of sensitivity of metals to light, in which
he reported a wide range of experiments conducted on
different forms of silver surfaces, as well as other metals,
in order to examine the chemical reactions involved.
During his retirement,Waterhouse engaged more in
historical research, but always with an eye on contem-
porary relevance. He studied the early history of the
telephoto lens, and his infl uential paper on the camera
obscura gathered a large number of references, in the
process demolishing Porta’s claim to have invented the
device. He surveyed the pre-history of photography
in the Smithsonian Institution annual report of 1903.
Signifi cantly, his 1905 presidential address to the RPS
was on “by-ways of photography.”
As well as technical articles, he was happy to write
for a more popular audience, for example contributing an
article on Niepce’s early photographic work with bitu-
men to Penrose’s Pictorial Annual for 1913–1914. He
organised the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1905 Loan
Exhibition of Process Engraving, for which he wrote the
catalogue’s introduction. Waterhouse was awarded the
RPS’s Progress Medal in 1890 for his spectrographic
work on dyes and the development of orthochromatic
photography, and the Voigtländer Medal of the Vienna
Photographic Society in 1895 for his contributions to
scientifi c photography.
Tom RufflesBiography
James John Waterhouse was born 24 July 1842 and
joined the Royal Bengal Artillery at 17. From July 1866
he spent fi ve months with the Great Trigonometrical
Survey at Dehra Dun learning photozincography before
becaming Assistant Surveyor-General in charge of the
photography section in the Surveyor-General’s Offi ce
in Calcutta. As well as writing on photography, he also
published on general matters relating to the Survey. He
retired in 1897 with the rank of Major-General, when
he returned to England. He never married. Among other
positions, he was President of the Asiatic Society of Ben-
gal from 1888 to 1890, President of the Photographic
Society of India from 1894 to 1897, and President of
the Royal Photographic Society from 1905 to 1907. He
became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in- He died at Eltham on 28 September 1922.
A portrait of James Waterhouse appears in The Pho-
tographic Journal, vol. 27 (1903): 217.
See also: Heliogravure; and Daguerreotype.