1503
Broadway in New York, as well as in branch offi ces in
Washington, D.C., Baltimore (under Henry Fitz, Jr., a
telescope maker who had collaborated in the design),
and several cities in Britain (in partnership with Richard
Beard). The duo obtained the second U.S. photographic
patent for a method of polishing plates (December 14,
1841, #2,391), and sold an accelerator called “Wolcott’s
mixture.” After Wolcott died in 1844 in Connecticut,
Johnson turned to other mechanical activities, although
he remained involved in photography and published
documents on his partnership with Wolcott. He died in
Maine in 1871.
See also: Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé;
Daguerreotype; and Camera Design: 1 (1830–1840).
Further Reading
Barger, Susan M., and White, William B., The Daguerreotype,
Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science, Wash-
ington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991.
Gernsheim Helmut, The Origins of Photography, Londres:
Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Rinhart, Floyd, and Marion Rinhart, “Wolcott and Johnson: Their
Camera and Their Photography.” History of Photography
(April 1977): 129–134.
——, The American Daguerreotype, Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1981.
Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene: A Social
History 1839–1889 (1938), repr. New York: Dover, 1964.
Welling, William, Photography in America, The Formative Years
1839–1900 (1978), Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1987.
WOLLASTON, WILLIAM HYDE
(1766–1828).
English chemist, natural philosopher, physiologist,
inventor
Born August 6, 1766, in East Dereham, Norfolk, Eng-
land to the Rev. Francis Wollaston (1731–1815) and
Althea Hyde, he attended Cambridge University and,
awarded a degree in medicine 1793. He became a Fel-
low of the Royal Society, 1793 and Foreign associate of
the French Academy of Sciences. Wollaston published
scientifi c papers in the 1790s.He gave up his London
medical practise in 1800 to pursue scientifi c research
and, with Humphry Davy, investigated physiology. Wol-
laston discovered the metals palladium and rhodium, and
devised a lucrative process to produce malleable plati-
num. His electrical work included an improved battery.
Wollaston’s optical work included investigations of the
solar spectrum. In 1806 he designed and patented the
camera lucida, a glass prism on a support which enabled
an artist to trace an impression of a view, ensuring ac-
curate perspective. Fox Talbot’s diffi culty in producing
acceptable drawings using the camera lucida, which
required artistic skill, spurred his chemical experiments
in photography. In 1812 Wollaston produced a camera
obscura with improved ‘periscopic’ (meniscus) lens.
Niépce used one of these lenses, made by Chevalier, in
his 1828 photographic experiments. A Wollaston-type
lens was used in the 1839 Daguerre-Giroux camera.
In 1806 Wollaston was elected Secretary of the Royal
Society, and interim President 1820. He died in London,
December 22, 1828. The mineral Wollastonite, a Cana-
dian town, and a Geological Society (London) medal
are named in his honor.
Stephen HerbertWOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS
Historians have downplayed the role of women pho-
tographers even though they were among its earliest
practitioners and took an active part in all areas of
photographic endeavour during the nineteenth-cen-
tury. The economic, social, and cultural constraints,
which governed women’s lives, were also to shape
their choice of subject matter and the manner in which
their photographic work was perceived. The Victorian
emphasis upon the domestic role of women narrowed
the range of experiences that were available to many
women, however, this does not lessen the work of
those amateurs who utilized photography to record
and construct accounts of their lives and those of their
families. Photography also provided women with a way
of earning a living beginning with the pioneer studio
owners and itinerant daguerreotypists of the 1840s and
expanding to include the legions of women workers who
were the preferred employees in certain sectors of the
photographic industry.
On an artistic level, women perhaps benefi ted from
the fact that the new medium of photography was not a
subject for academic study. It was therefore freed from
the hierarchy and regulations which were attached to
the Fine Arts and which often precluded women’s
full participation within them. In some respects this
freedom made it easier for women to play a notable
role in international photographic movements such as
Pictorialism.
A small number of women contributed to the pre-his-
tory of conventional photography and were engaged to
a limited extent in the scientifi c experimentation which
preceded the announcement of the Daguerreotype and
paper negative processes in 1839. In the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century it was not altogether un-
usual for some wealthy women to have some popular-
ized knowledge of science and to cultivate this interest
on a limited basis. Elizabeth Fulhame, who published a
book in London in 1749 outlining her attempts to create
permanent images by light, could be numbered among