1512
to create the grain for conventional intaglio printing.
However photo-fi ligrane and photo-lithophane remained
mere novelties (although Leon Warnerke apparently
adapted photo-fi ligrane to forge Russian banknotes),
and Goupil gravure, while producing beautiful velvet
blacks, ultimately proved too costly even for the high
end of the art market.
Around 1900 two German inventors, Paul Charles
and Stephan Faujat, attempted to revitalize woodbury-
type by automating the process (they also produced a
few reportedly remarkable three-color prints), but it was
too late. Despite its delicacy and beauty, woodburytype
remained a transitional technology for publishing pho-
tographs, a labour-intensive means of mass-producing
reproductions of carbon prints that partially replaced
the pasted-in albumen silver photograph, but was itself
replaced by faster, cheaper, type-compatible processes
like the half-tone.
Philip Jackson
See also: Carbon Print; Woodbury, Walter Bentley;
Swan, Sir Joseph Wilson; Albumen Print; Carbutt,
John; Stereoscopy; Cartes-de-Visite; Cabinet
Cards; British Journal Photographic Almanac;
Braun, Adolphe; Bruckmann Verlag, Friedrich;
Goupil & Cie; Lemercier, Lerebours & Bareswill;
Galerie Contemporaine (1876–1884); Landscape;
Architecture; Abney, William de Wiveleslie;
Documentary; Thomson, John; Vidal, Léon;
Collotype; Photogravure; Warnerke, Leon; and Half-
tone Printing.
Further Reading
Bower, Peter, “Leon Warnerke (1837–1900): Master Forger and
RPS Progress Medalist,” Photo Historian, no. 114 (Dec.
1996): 7–15.
Bower, Peter, “Walter Woodbury and the Photo-fi ligrane Process,”
The Quarterly: The Review of the British Association of Paper
Historians, no. 12 (Sept. 1994): 10–12.
Burton, W.K., “The Woodbury-type Process” and “Stannotype.”
In Practical Guide to Photographic & Photo-Mechanical
Printing, 254–272, London: Marion, 1887.
Crawford, William, “Woodburytype.” In The Keepers of Light: A
History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes,
285–289, Dobbs Ferry, New York: Morgan and Morgan,
1979.
“Stannotype,” British Journal of Photography, vol. 31 (1 Feb.
1884–25 April 1884):.71, 87, 102–103, 134–135, 149–150,
166–167, 182–183, 198–199, 214–215, 261
Vidal, Léon, Traité Pratique de Photoglyptie, (Annales de la
photographie), Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1881.
Wakeman, Geoffrey, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical
Revolution, Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1973.
Wills, Camfi eld, and Deirdre, “Walter Bentley Woodbury, 1834–
1885.” Photographic Journal, vol. 125, no. 12 (Dec. 1985):
551–554 and vol. 126, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 40–41.
“The Woodburytype Process.” Photographic News, vol. 27
(1883):.582, 723; vol. 28 (1884): 177, 210–211, 226, 276
WORTHINGTON, ARTHUR MASON
(1852–1916)
Physicist and scientifi c photographer
Born 11 June 1852, Arthur Worthington, FRS, be-
came Professor of Physics and then Head Master of
the Royal Naval Engineering College, Devonport.
Having published papers in 1877 and 1882 on the
physics of surface tension, especially the stretching
of liquids, Worthington introduced photography into
his experimentation in 1894, following in the footsteps
of the stroboscopic work of C. V. Boys and Ernst and
Ludwig Mach. Worthington and his assistant R. S.
Cole established a method for taking individual frames
of drops illuminated with a Leyden-jar spark, which
they executed and exhibited at the Royal Institution
in May 1894. Having decided that photography was
a more practical method for the study of surface ten-
sion, Worthington conducted the full range of his
experiments again, this time documenting each one
photographically, one frame at a time. He was the fi rst
to make the experiment of the falling milk drop, which
has since become the visual icon of fl uid dynamics.
Although Worthington’s early work was more a com-
parison of one sort of drop to another, he carried on to
track all phases of a single drop. In 1908, Worthington
published his book, A Study of Splashes, which was
used extensively by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in
his extraordinarily infl uential On Growth and Form
(1917). Arthur Worthington died 5 December 1916.
Kelley WilderWOTHLY, JACOB (active 1850s–1860s)
Jacob Wothly’s name is associated with a short-lived
attempt to introduce a printing process based on ura-
nium in addition to silver, as a method of overcoming
the recognised impermanence of albumen paper. In
the event, the Wothlytype, patented in 1864, proved to
suffer from the same problems of fading, and fell out of
use. One of the fi rst to publish criticism of the process,
William Henry Fox Talbot, shared photography’s dis-
appointment that the prints were not more permanent.
The printing-out-paper was coated with a mixture of
uranium ammonio-nitrate and silver nitrate in collo-
dion, but was superseded by collodio-chloride papers
before the end of the 1860s.
Wothly, originally a portrait photographer producing
ambrotypes, with a studio in Theaterplatz in Aachen,
appears to have been in business before 1853.
By the late 1850s, working with collodion nega-
tives, he had developed an interest in making enlarge-
ments, and designed a signifi cant improvement to
Woodward’s Solar Enlarger, simplifying the means
of keeping the refl ected light focussed on the back of