535
Sutton, Thomas, The Calotype Process. A Handbook to Pho-
tography on Paper, London: Joseph Cundall and Sampson
Low, 1855.
FIZEAU, LOUIS ARMAND HIPPOLYTE
(1819–1896 )
French physicist
Fizeau was born in Paris on September 23 into a well
established family. His father had been a professor at the
Faculté de médecine de Paris, where he taught pathol-
ogy since 1823. As a boy he spent his youth between
Paris and the family property of Suresnes. With the end
of his secondary studies at Stanislas college, during the
years 1840, he worked many jobs, but Leon Bernard
Foucault, who was independently weathly, enabled him
to fully devote himself to the study of sciences such as
medicine initially, then physics, and later optics at the
Collège de France, where he attended the lectures of
Victor Regnault, and at the observatory of Paris under
the direction of François Arago. He was undoubtedly
infl uenced by the surgeon Alfred Donné, who he knew
through his friendship with Foucault. Fizeau became
interested in the Daguerrian process, in which he made
great efforts to become very quickly accomplished.
In August 1840 he presented, in front of the Académie
des Sciences, his process to improve testing methods by
covering them with a thin metal gold varnish, obtained
by a dissolution of gold chloride mingled with soda
hyposulphhee. This method, provided the advantages of
considerably reducing the mirror effect of the daguerrian
plates by raising the tone of the images, and of making
the images more resistant to damage caused by fric-
tion, abrasions, and oxidations. This major innovation
gave him recognition nationally and internationally
within photographic communities. In 1841, Fizeau
began working on an original method of engraving
the daguerreotype, of which Sir W.R. Grove presented
on the same topic that year at the London Electronical
Society. Fizeau’s method, however, combined the use
of acid, fatty oil and gold, and enabled him to transform
the plates into matrices for engraving.
In 1842, this complex process of engraving was
used for three illustrations of the second volume of the
Excursions daguerriennes celebrated in Lerebours’
publication. The following year, after various improve-
ments, Fizeau protected his invention through the use
of a patent, and also that year, Claudet introduced the
process in England. At the same time, Fizeau became
interested in the reduction of exposure times and intro-
duced in 1841, an accelerating agent similar to bromine,
which enabled him to produce images in approximately
15 seconds. This solution was undoubtedly suggested
to him by engraver Augustin-François Lemaître, who
was the former collaborator of Niépce and Niépce de
St- Victor. But Lemaître was not the only engraver con-
sulted by Fizeau in his research. Fizeau collaborated
with Louis Henri Brévière, the director of the engraving
of Royal Printing works.
Until 1849, Foucault and Fizeau, probably encour-
aged by Arago, jointly worked together to fi nd the exact
analysis and the measurement of various photographic
light sources. It was probably within this framework
that they obtained on August 2, 1845, at the observa-
tory of Paris the fi rst daguerrian image of the Sun, in
1/60th of second. The following year, with other regular
collaborators from the observatory, like N.P Lerebours
and Secrétan, Fizeau published Traité de photographie.
In 1847, he appeared at the head of the list of the “most
remarkable daguerreotypists” determined by Thierry in
his shortened general History of photography. In 1848,
Histoire générale abrégée de la photographie awarded
him a medal for his research.
At the same time though, the essence of his work in
the fi eld of photography seemed to be complete. His last
known images, from the experiments of heliographic
engraving done in collaboration with Lemaître and
Hurlimann, went back to 1849, and this same year,
Fizeau, abruptly ended his collaboration with Foucault.
Both Fizeau and Foucault conducted research on speed
determination based upon opposite theories. In 1856, the
Institute awarded him the prize Triennal before electing
him, and four years later, he became a member of the
Academy of Science, general physics. For a time he was
superintendent at the Polytechnic School of Paris, and
was named, in 1875, as a foreign member of the The
Royal Society, London, and decorated with the Legion
of Honor the same year. In 1878, he became president
of the Academy of Science and entered into the pres-
tigious Bureau of Longitudes of the Observatory of
Paris. His activities within the Academy proved that his
interest for photography remained wholly intact at the
beginning of the years 1870. For example, he brought
to life the commission formed to observe the passage
of Venus in front of the Sun and was, on this occasion,
one of the defenders of the use of the daguerreotype for
this event. A few years later, in 1887, he supported the
photographic project of creating a chart of the Sky for
the international congress of astrophysics of Paris.
In 1853, Fizeau married Thérèse Valentine de Jussieu,
from a famous family of botanists. Together they had
two girls and a boy. Following the death of his wife in
1863, he withdrew to the Château de Venteuil à Jouarre
in the Seine and Marne. It was there that he died of a can-
cer on September 18, 1896. Four years earlier however,
several of his images had been presented in the historical
section of the International exhibition of photography
of Paris. To reconstruct the exact photographic produc-
tion of Fizeau would be diffi cult today for example, an
image is made up of numerous daguerreotype plates,