1494
The demands of calotype photography as a hobby
soon outstripped the time available to the young doc-
tor, who was destined to carve out a signifi cant career
for himself in surgery. He studied medicine at Leeds
medical School in the 1840s, where he and his fellow
students are reported to have experimented on each other
to assess the anaesthetic effects of ether. He advocated
the use of Lister’s carbolic spray as an antiseptic and
presented a major paper on surgery to the British Medi-
cal Association in Bath in 1878
Wheelhouse gave all his negatives to Lord
Lincoln, and they were reportedly destroyed during a
fi re at Lincoln’s house in 1879.
John Hannavy
WHIPPLE, JOHN ADAMS (1822–1891)
American photographer and inventor
Whipple was born in Grafton, Massachusetts, on 10
September 1822. As a boy he became interested in chem-
istry and attempted to reproduce the newly discovered
invention of daguerreotypy. He came to Boston in 1840
and began manufacturing chemicals for daguerrean art-
ists. When the fumes later caused him to abandon this
practice he turned to the making of pictures although as
his numerous inventions show, he always maintained an
interest in improving the photographic process.
Whipple entered into partnership with Albert Litch
in 1845, and they opened a studio at 96 Washington
Street, a center of picture-making activity and industry
in Boston. Litch left in 1847, and Whipple continued
under his own name at the same address. Between 1856
and 1859 he partnered with James Wallace Black; the
quality of work produced by their studio rivaled that of
the well-known fi rm of Southworth & Hawes. Whipple’s
studio was located on the top fl oor so that he could take
advantage of the natural light. Display cases at street
level alerted passers by to the studio’s presence. One
of its special features was a “Miniature Steam Engine”
that powered the buffi ng wheels used in preparing the
plates and operated the revolving sign in the form of a
sun that Whipple used to entice visitors. His portrait
clientele included the highest of Boston society (he
made a group of daguerreotype portraits of the Harvard
class of 1852, the fi rst class to be photographed, and
continued to do so through 1860). Whipple was known
for the psychological content of his portraits, for his
ability to put clients at ease by telling little stories, and
for his skill in arranging sitters.
Whipple was a pioneer in the fi eld of astronomical
photography. In the late 1840s and 1850s he collaborated
with Professor William Cranch Bond and his son George
Phillips Bond at the Harvard College Observatory. The
fi rst successful representation of the moon was taken on
WHEELHOUSE, CLAUDIUS GALEN
March 14, 1851, by mounting the daguerreotype plate
in the focus mechanism of the Great Refractor, one of
the largest telescopes in the world at the time. Made by
synchronizing the exposures with the pauses between
the movements of the clockwork mechanism, the result-
ing image had an exposure time of thirteen seconds and
measured three inches in diameter. A daguerreotype
enlargement of the view exhibited at the Crystal Palace
in London in 1851 awed audiences with the incredible
details of the lunar surface and won a medal for excel-
lence of production, “indicating the commencement of
a new era in astronomical representation.” Whipple and
his partners, fi rst William B. Jones and then Black, made
about seventy exposures of different subjects, including
the planet Jupiter. Whipple and Black worked again
with the Harvard Observatory in 1857 producing over
two hundred photographs of stars using the collodion
wet plate process.
Whipple contributed many inventions that advanced
the cause of photography. In 1846 he began experiment-
ing with slides of microscopic insects and specimens,
which a contemporary observer described as “the most
delicate tissue of the tiniest animal.” In 1849 he patented
the crayon daguerreotype portrait, a technique he devel-
oped to create an effect of softness around the sitter as
if the fi gure was fl oating in space. He achieved this by
posing his subject against a light background and then
placing in front of the lens a card with an aperture, which
he moved in a circular motion during exposure so as to
avoid any hard-edged lines.
Whipple’s biggest contribution was the crystalotype
process, which debuted in 1850. In 1844 Whipple, build-
ing on the experiments of early photographic pioneers,
began exploring the possibilities of making paper pho-
tographs from glass plate negatives. On June 25, 1850,
he and Jones patented the crystalotype process in which
light sensitive materials were suspended in a mixture
of egg white and honey, poured onto a glass plate, and
exposed. In 1852 a writer for the Photographic Art
Journal noted that the crystalotype presented “all the
beauty of an actual painting with the unerring accuracy
of the daguerreotype likeness.” Indeed, the name crys-
talotype comes from the crystal clear transparency of
the glass negatives.
Because of the long exposures, the crystalotype was
fi rst used for copying daguerreotypes. The process’s
reproductive capabilities enabled Whipple to produce
prints for use in periodicals and book publications. His
crystalotypes were mounted as frontispieces in the 1853
and 1854 issues of The Photographic Art Journal and the
publication Homes of American Statesmen (New York,
1854), which has been described by one scholar as the
fi rst photographically illustrated book published in the
United States. In 1852 examples of Whipple’s process
were on view at Root’s Gallery of Daguerrean Art in