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{SPEAKER name="Ann Shumard"}
The object that we are going to be seeing as -as Ian has told you is very small.

[00:00:05]
It's - It's really not even as large as the button on my jacket.

[00:00:09]
[[laughter]]

[00:00:10]
It is easy to miss. But it's really quite an extraordinary piece.

[00:00:13]
To give you, um, an outline of Samuel Morse's career,

[00:00:17]
I'll just start by saying that this month we have been featuring great communicators.

[00:00:23]
And the topics of each of our face-to-face talks have been someone involved in communication.

[00:00:29]
When we think of Samuel Morse, we certainly think of the communication via the telegraph, but there are more than-

[00:00:36]
there's really more than one way to communicate, and visual communication
[00:00:40]
was an important part of Morse's life and career.

[00:00:43]
He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791.

[00:00:49]
He got his early education at, uh, Phillip's Academy in Andover,

[00:00:54]
and then went on to - to Yale College. While he was at Yale,

[00:00:58]
he spent his leisure time as a portraitist, making, uh, silhouettes

[00:01:03]
and painted miniatures on ivory for, uh, for his classmates.

[00:01:09]
And in fact, he wrote home to say that all of his leisure time was taken up in making portraits, and

[00:01:14]
that he had a steady sort of queue of people who were, um, eager to avail themselves of his services.

[00:01:20]
His profile portraits were a dollar, and he was selling his painted miniatures for five dollars.

[00:01:26]
When he graduated from Yale in 1810, he very much, I think, hoped,

[00:01:32]
to be able to pursue a career in the fine arts. But his parents, being what-
[00:01:37]
really, more practical, uh, apprenticed him to a bookseller in Boston.

[00:01:41]
Well, after a year of that, he managed, uh,

[00:01:45]
to continue to do some painting on the side and he met Washington Allston,

[00:01:50]
the, um, celebrated American painter, and Allston- he really became his champion.

[00:01:56]
And with Allston's encouragement, he went back to his parents

[00:02:00]
and begged them for permission to go to London and study with Allston

[00:02:05]
and prepare to enter the Royal Academy, uh, to study to be a painter.

[00:02:09]
So, his parents relented and in 1811 he sailed for London with, with Allston.

[00:02:15]
And he prepared with Allston, uh, before enrolling in the, uh, in the Royal Academy,

[00:02:21]
and there he achieved, uh, a measure of success.

[00:02:24]
The Royal Academy had a very strong sort of approach to the hierarchy of the fine arts,

[00:02:30]
and at the very top of the pyramid was history painting,

[00:02:33]
and that embraced, uh, mythology, elevating themes;

[00:02:38]
just pedestrian portraiture was, was considerably lower on the ladder.

[00:02:44]
So, history painting topped it all, and that could include mythological subjects.

[00:02:49]
While, uh, while Morse was studying at the Royal Academy, he produced a little statuette,

[00:02:54]
a terracotta of Hercules. He painted a, an image

[00:03:00]
of the dying Hercules that received quite favorable notice,

[00:03:04]
and he also, uh, did a painting, I think it was called something-

[00:03:08]
I think it's the Judgement of Jupiter. Anyway, that was the direction that his career was going.

[00:03:13]
And he was very hopeful that upon returning to the United States,

[00:03:16]
he would be able to, to usher in a new age of artistic enlighten, enlightenment

[00:03:22]
in the United States that would rival- and that his work would rival that of Michelangelo,

[00:03:28]
and Rafael, and Titian.

[00:03:30]
His mother had written to him saying that if he expected to make money from anything other than portraits in the United States,

[00:03:35]
he was going to be disappointed. But, he had all the enthusiasm of youth and he opened his studio in Boston.

[00:03:41]
Well, even portrait commissions proved to be rather hard to come by

[00:03:46]
and he exhibited his painting of Jupiter, and his painting of Hercules,

[00:03:51]
and although people did look at them, they weren't particularly impressed,

[00:03:54]
and he had to make his living, initially, as an itinerant portrait painter through-

[00:03:59]
really throughout New England. And he spent the, uh, spent the winters in Charlestown,

[00:04:04]
painting there. In 1823, he opened a studio in New York,

[00:04:09]
and in 1826, he was one of the founders of the National Academy

[00:04:16]
in New York, which was a rival to the American Academy

[00:04:22]
a school and association of artists.

[00:04:25]
He was interested - really from the time he was at Yale -

[00:04:29]
in, not only the fine arts, but the sciences.

[00:04:32]
He still was maintaining hope that he was going to make his mark in the United States

[00:04:37]
as a painter of grand subjects.

[00:04:40]
And in 1821 and '22, he undertook a major canvas

[00:04:44]
representing the US house of representatives.

[00:04:46]
That painting is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery here in Washington,

[00:04:49]
so you do have an opportunity to see it.

[00:04:52]
It was, um, grand in scale, painted on canvas that he had brought with him
[00:04:56]
from his studying, uh, period in London.

[00:04:58]
Well, the painting proved anything but a popular success.

[00:05:03]
He had hoped that people would pay money to come and see his painting and that it would

[00:05:07]
establish him as this really great American artist. It didn't do that for him.

[00:05:12]
He began really to go back to his interest in, in science that

[00:05:18]
had begun at Yale, where he had studied under professors of chemistry

[00:05:23]
and attended lectures on electricity.

[00:05:26]
And he began developing the, um, y'know, he began to develop a couple of different projects.

[00:05:32]
One was a pump for a fire engine,

[00:05:35]
which he designed with his brother, that didn't turn out to be terribly successful.

[00:05:39]
And he also designed a machine for replicating marble sculpture.

[00:05:44]
It turned out that that infringed on an existing patent, so he wasn't able to patent it.

[00:05:48]
He continued to paint, he was awarded the position

[00:05:53]
of the - basically the teacher of painting and sculpture - at the University of the City of New York and had a studio.

[00:05:59]
He had a series of sort of family tragedies.

[00:06:02]
His wife died, his mother died, his father died, all within a three-year period.

[00:06:06]
And he went off to Europe in 1829

[00:06:10]
with the idea of sort of recharging and regrouping.

[00:06:14]
He spent his time divided really between Italy and France

[00:06:18]
and came back to the United States on board ship in 1832.

[00:06:22]
And on that crossing, he had a conversation with a gentleman who

[00:06:27]
talked about experiments related to an electro-, um, electromagnetic telegraph.

[00:06:34]
This was some of the early work was going on in this area in Europe,

[00:06:39]
but the conception of the, of the telegraph that, that Morse developed really began -

[00:06:46]
it had its, it had its sort of roots in that, the conversations that he had with this other gentleman.

[00:06:51]
And later on, people on ship board with Morse would attest

[00:06:55]
to the fact that although they had talked about the properties of electromagnetism,

[00:07:00]
it was really Morse who came up with the idea for the telegraph.

[00:07:04]
One would be a recording device, and he actually made notes in his

[00:07:08]
his, um, little, uh, journal about what he had, what he had come up with.

[00:07:12]
He got back to New York, and set to work on another painting,

[00:07:17]
this was the, this was the painting that depicted the gallery at the Louvre.

[00:07:21]
And again, this was going to be his, his next big opportunity

[00:07:25]
to try to garner some popular support for his art.

[00:07:31]
It was as unsuccessful in gaining that sort of popular approbation

[00:07:35]
as the, as the House of Representatives' painting had been.

[00:07:40]
So, he turned his attention quite heavily then to working on his, on his telegraph.

[00:07:47]
And he demonstrated it for the first time in 1837,

[00:07:51]
and he applied for a U.S. patent.

[00:07:53]
But the patent process moved very slowly

[00:07:57]
and he despaired of getting, of getting that patent any time soon.

[00:08:02]
So he went back to Europe with the idea that perhaps in, in Britain

[00:08:06]
he could secure a British patent, and in France, perhaps a French patent.

[00:08:11]
He was completely unsuccessful in London.

[00:08:13]
In fact, was rebuffed and given really very little attention. But when he got to Paris,

[00:08:19]
he was very well received by the scientific community which was quite excited about the,

[00:08:24]
the telegraph that he, that he described and demonstrated.

[00:08:27]
At the same time that he was in Paris in 1838 and then in 1839,

[00:08:33]
news of another extraordinary discovery was announced.

[00:08:37]
And that was in January of 1839, when the French Physicist François Arago

[00:08:44]
announced to the world the invention and revealed the existence of the Daguerreotype process,

[00:08:52]
the first practical photographic method which had been developed

[00:08:55]
by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, in partnership with another man who had died some years earlier.

[00:09:02]
Morse was intrigued - Daguerre was an artist,

[00:09:07]
as well as a scientist, and in fact, imagined that his Daguerreotype process

[00:09:12]
would prove very useful for artists

[00:09:14]
as a means of gathering information when they,

[00:09:17]
when they constructed their larger compositions.

[00:09:20]
Morse had the opportunity to go to Daguerre's studio on March 7th of 1839,

[00:09:27]
and was shown the Daguerreotype for the first time.

[00:09:30]
The Daguerreotype was created by sensitizing a silver-plated sheet of copper

[00:09:36]
that was then placed in a camera and exposed to the subject matter.

[00:09:40]
It was then developed by exposing it to heated fumes of mercury.

[00:09:47]
The Daguerreotype really was just like a mirror that captured the image permanently.

[00:09:54]
And Morse was absolutely fascinated.

[00:09:57]
He then invited Daguerre back to his lodgings to see his telegraph.

[00:10:02]
And so the two men had an immediate sort of connection

[00:10:04]
in their interests, both in the fine arts and in inventing.

[00:10:08]

As it so happened while Daguerre was visiting with Morse,

[00:10:12]
a fire swept through the diorama that was his bread and butter.

[00:10:16]
He operated a diorama in Paris where lighting and moving canvases

[00:10:21]
gave the illusion of a scene passing, an animated scene, passing before the paying audience.

[00:10:27]
Fortunately, the fire didn't spread to Daguerre's residence

[00:10:32]
where all of his materials related to the Daguerreotype were.

[00:10:36]
The next day, Morse sat down and penned a letter,

[00:10:38]
this was March 9th of 1839, in which he described,

[00:10:41]
the extraordinary qualities of the Daguerreotype.

[00:10:45]
That letter went with him when he sailed back to the United States,

[00:10:49]
and it was published in the New York Observer, a newspaper that his,

[00:10:54]
that his brother published. The account of the Daguerreotype then spread to other newspapers,

[00:10:58]
but the description of how the process was actually effected was not released at that time.

[00:11:04]
It wasn’t until August of 1839, that the process was revealed in full

[00:11:10]
at a presentation in Paris, and it was then, that was on August 19th,

[00:11:16]
and then a few weeks later, the process, was,

[00:11:19]
reached the United States. Everything, of course, could travel,

[00:11:22]
the news could travel only as fast as a ship could sail.

[00:11:25]
And so it was really mid-September that the information about the Daguerreotype reached New York.

[00:11:31]
There was tremendous interest in being able to replicate this,

[00:11:35]
this extraordinary process that allowed people for the first time to to capture and secure,

[00:11:41]
for you know, permanently photographic images.

[00:11:44]
The process had rather slow rather, rather long exposure times,

[00:11:49]
and the sensitivity of the plates was pretty slow.

[00:11:53]
Which meant it wasn't initially practical for -for portraiture.

[00:11:56]
But the American experimenters recognized that the real,

[00:12:00]
the real value for the Daguerreotype certainly as a commercial enterprise was going to be making it practical for portraiture.

[00:12:06]
And so they set about trying to improve the process by using better lenses,

[00:12:11]
changing the chemistry slightly to make the plates more sensitive,

[00:12:15]
and it wasn't long before the, before Daguerreotype portraits were actually possible.


[00:12:21]
Now, Samuel Morse was one of the great promoters of the daguerreotype,
[00:12:25]
he was tremendously enthusiastic about it, he saw this as a wonderful tool to artists,

[00:12:30]
and himself included. And he opened, what really was the second portrait studio,

[00:12:37]
in New York, in collaboration with another professor at the University,

[00:12:42]
the City University there in New York.

[00:12:45]
They operated on the rooftop of the University building.

[00:12:48]
They put together a, sort of a hastily constructed structure with a glass roof.

[00:12:54]
The exposure times were still considerable and one of the sitters,

[00:12:58]
in fact a relative of Morse, described sitting there with her face tanning under the brilliant light

[00:13:04]
and tears streaming down her face as she sat there for several minutes while the daguerreotype plate was exposed.

[00:13:11]
Fortunately, the improvements shortened those

[00:13:15]
exposure times and it wasn't long before people were sitting for their portraits.

[00:13:19]
Morse maintained his studio with Dr. Draper until the fall,

[00:13:24]
sometime late in the fall of 1841.

[00:13:27]
By this time he had gone back to working, sort of full out on the, on the telegraph.

[00:13:34]
And in 1840, he actually secured the patent.

[00:13:38]
And in 1843, he was able to demonstrate the telegraph

[00:13:44]
again for Congress, and he secured what he'd been seeking all along, which was money

[00:13:49]
to construct the prototype line between Washington and Baltimore.

[00:13:55]
Congress appropriated 30,000 dollars in, sort of, the closing minutes of the session in 1843,

[00:14:00]
and in 1844 the line was constructed and opened between Washington and Baltimore.

[00:14:07]
Famously, the first message was "What hath God wrought?"

[00:14:11]
and Morse's partner in the business, Mr. Vail was able to telegraph back the response.

[00:14:18]
That launched the telegraph era,

[00:14:21]
and although Morse had hoped that the United States government

[00:14:25]
would purchase the rights to the telegraph for 100,000 dollars,

[00:14:30]
that didn't happen.

[00:14:31]
He was very fortunate in joining up with a business partner who

[00:14:37]
was able to handle the business end of things.

[00:14:40]
A number of different entrepreneurs then bought rights and

[00:14:43]
began stringing telegraph lines throughout the country.

[00:14:47]
By 1866, the Western Union Company, which embraced all of these

[00:14:54]
smaller telegraph companies, was formed and that's really, sort of, where the story ends.

[00:15:00]
What we should talk about now, of course, is this little portrait.

[00:15:05]
In addition to operating his Daguerrean studio with Dr. Draper,

[00:15:10]
Samuel Morse also gave lessons in Daguerreotype.

[00:15:14]
He offered instruction into what turned out to be the first generation

[00:15:19]
of daguerreotypists and photographers in this country,

[00:15:23]
and those included a number of names that are really quite famous in the history of photography.

[00:15:28]
One of them was Mathew Brady, another was Albert Sands Southworth,

[00:15:33]
of the famous firm of Southworth and Hawes, and we have a wonderful example of

[00:15:37]
a Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype in the portrait of Nancy Southworth-Hawes who appears across the way.

[00:15:45]
One of his other pupils was a fellow named Jonas M. Edwards,

[00:15:50]
who was no, no older than 17 or 18 in 1841 when he learned the process from Morse,

[00:15:57]
And Mr. Edwards and a friend, Thomas Starr, also a pupil of Morse,


[00:16:04]
opened their first Daguerrean operation in Richmond in December of 1841.

[00:16:09]
And we know this from advertisements in the Richmond papers.

[00:16:14]
But also from a letter that survives from

[00:16:17]
Samuel Morse written in a response to one he'd obviously received from Jonas Edwards

[00:16:22]
congratulating him on the fact that his business was going well and commenting a bit on the fact

[00:16:27]
that Morse himself had not been engaged in any daguerreotyping since the fall.

[00:16:31]
The little image of Samuel Morse that we have here is by Jonas Edwards.

[00:16:38]
Edwards joined up with Edward Anthony, another student of Morse,

[00:16:42]
and they embarked on quite an ambitious enterprise in Washington DC to daguerreotype

[00:16:47]
all the members of Congress. And they did this between 1842 and 1844.

[00:16:53]
By the time they exhibited these portraits in New York City in their Broadway gallery,

[00:16:58]
they had more than 400 portraits of notable Americans.

[00:17:02]
And this is really the first time that photographic portraits of significant Americans are collected and exhibited.

[00:17:09]
Sadly, that entire collection was lost in the later fire.

[00:17:12]
But both Edwards and Edward Anthony

[00:17:17]
could certainly claim a milestone in having made those images.

[00:17:21]
Those daguerreotypes also served as the basis for a very popular print
[00:17:24]
showing Henry Clay addressing the senate.

[00:17:28]
And each of the little likenesses of the senators that surround him

[00:17:31]
is based on one of the daguerreotype portraits.

[00:17:34]
Sadly, Mr. Edwards didn't live terribly long

[00:17:38]
after the opening of that exhibit in New York

[00:17:43]
and, in fact, he died in 1847. At the time of his death,

[00:17:47]
it was reported that he had died of an ailment of the heart,

[00:17:50]
and later, several years later, in an account of some of the early achievers in the

[00:17:56]
Daguerrean process it was mentioned that he had,

[00:18:00]
he had really sort of been a victim of his, of his sort of having gone all out

[00:18:07]
and been a victim of his enthusiasm. It's quite likely,

[00:18:11]
given the fact that he was only 23 when he died,

[00:18:14]
that he very well may have suffered ill effects from the chemistry.

[00:18:17]
Of course, the, you know, nowadays daguerreotypists,

[00:18:22]
and there are some that still practice this very interesting process,

[00:18:26]
know all about venting their spaces and they have to be very careful about the materials they use

[00:18:31]
and no one, nowadays, uses heated mercury.

[00:18:34]
You can still develop the daguerreotype without heating the mercury,

[00:18:38]
but the mercury fumes certainly had, you know, dangerous health consequences.

[00:18:43]
Another member of the Edwards and Edward Anthony group

[00:18:49]
died several years later, and Edward Anthony went into the Photographic supply business

[00:18:55]
a short time after that, so you can't help but wonder whether the loss of two partners

[00:18:59]
had something to do with Edward Anthony going

[00:19:02]
into the photographic supply business,

[00:19:04]
as apposed to remaining an active daguerreotypist.

[00:19:07]
This little piece came up for sale at auction several years ago

[00:19:12]
and that was how the portrait gallery was able to acquire it.

[00:19:15]
We know that was by, that its by Jonas Edwards

[00:19:19]
because of the little handwritten tag that came with it.

[00:19:23]
And in this sheet that we are passing around you, you can see the little tag

[00:19:27]
tied to the top of the little locket piece. And it says that it was

[00:19:32]
made by Jonas Edwards, you know, that the subject was Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph.

[00:19:36]
And it says that it was taken in 1845, and it was given by Uncle,

[00:19:40]
Uncle Jonas to a family member,

[00:19:46]
and that family member in turn gave it to another family member,

[00:19:49]
and that was the, sort of, story behind it.

[00:19:51]
But it, its certainly a wonderful piece.

[00:19:55]
It's the only daguerreotype from life

[00:19:58]
that we know of, of Samuel Morse.

[00:20:00]
There are a couple of copy plates,

[00:20:04]
meaning that a daguerreotype was made of a daguerreotype -

[00:20:08]
daguerreotypes are direct positive images so there isn't a negative.

[00:20:12]
You can't, you make a daguerreotype and that's a unique object.

[00:20:17]
The only way to replicate it is to put it in front of a camera

[00:20:20]
and make a daguerreotype of that daguerreotype. So, there are copy

[00:20:24]
daguerreotype, but a daguerreotype from life is obviously the most desirable,

[00:20:28]
and so this little piece in this little pendant,

[00:20:32]
is perhaps, at least as far as we know,

[00:20:35]
the only surviving image, and the earliest image that we have of Samuel Morse.

[00:20:40]
Photographic jewelry was one of the popular

[00:20:44]
forms in which photographs, and photographic images,

[00:20:48]
circulated in the early days of photography.

[00:20:52]
And they appropriated some of these same mounts and presentations

[00:20:57]
that had been used for painted portraits.

[00:20:59]
So, there are painted miniatures that were displayed in these sorts of large pendants or in other forms of jewelry.

[00:21:06]
But the popularity of the daguerreotype

[00:21:09]
quickly, you know quickly-

[00:21:12]
didn't by any means eliminate interest in painted miniature portraits,

[00:21:17]
but it certainly muscled in on the business.

[00:21:20]
And you can see from the variety, of forms of photographic jewelry,

[00:21:24]
from pendants to a wonderful pair of earrings,

[00:21:28]
to even a little change purse with a daguerreotype of a dog on it,

[00:21:32]
that there was just a huge amount of enthusiasm for photographic portraiture

[00:21:36]
that was embedded in the wonderful pieces of jewelry.

[00:21:41]
Well, I think that gives us, a you know, sort of general sort of survey of

[00:21:48]
Samuel Morse's career and if you have any questions about his life

[00:21:55]
or this little piece, I'll be happy to try and answer them.

[00:21:59]
[UNKNOWN MALE SPEAKER}
How did they get such a small image?

[00:22:04]
{SPEAKER name="Ann Shumard"}
The, it's basically, the images were done on a larger plate

[00:22:08]
and then the plates cut down.

[00:22:10]
So, the aperture of the lens can basically determine

[00:22:15]
sort of what size, what size you get.

[00:22:17]
And I've seen examples of daguerreotype images sort of three different,

[00:22:23]
or four different portraits on a single plate.

[00:22:26]
The plate would basically be moved in the plate holder and

[00:22:28]
exposed in a sort of quadrant, so you could get sort of four different images on a single plate.

[00:22:35]
And then those would have been cut in order to fit them into the jewelry.

[00:22:39]
In fact, one of the very, the first American camera that was

[00:22:43]
patented, and that was patented by Alexander Wolcott,

[00:22:46]
who opened the first portrait studio in New York,

[00:22:49]
in the spring of 1840- in March of 1840.

[00:22:54]
That camera in its patent description

[00:22:57]
mentions that it's suitable for making breast pins, that it can actually be adapted


[00:23:03]
to make images that are small enough to be used for breast pins. So,

[00:23:07]
right from the get-go they were thinking about photographic jewelry.

[00:23:13]
{SPEAKER name="Unknown Speaker"}
Did Morse ever have the ability to become an artist?

[00:23:18]
{SPEAKER name="Ann Shumard"}
Well, he gave it up, and in fact, he actually was, he's really quite a wonderful painter.

[00:23:24]
It's sad that he was, you know that he was, you know that he was unsuccessful

[00:23:31]
in gaining the kind of acclaim for his art, that he had hoped.

[00:23:36]
But he'd took great pride in the telegraph and its success.

[00:23:42]
His goal from the very beginning and it seems to have been one that he had almost from childhood,

[00:23:49]
was that he wanted to do something that was going to be in the best interest,

[00:23:54]
sort of not necessarily of himself, but in developing the nation.

[00:23:58]
And he had these very grand ideas about America's place in the world,

[00:24:03]
that it was going to last for a thousand years, and

[00:24:07]
everything that could be done to advance the nation,

[00:24:13]
whether it was in the fine arts or

[00:24:16]
or technology, was all to the better.

[00:24:17]
And, you know, each thing he tried,

[00:24:20]
he did it, you know, you know that in the back of his mind it was

[00:24:24]
is this going to be the thing that is going to allow me to make this

[00:24:27]
spectacular contribution that's going to advance the culture.

[00:24:31]
With his painting he was really aiming at elevating American taste

[00:24:36]
to a level that was equivalent to that of Europe, but native born.

[00:24:42]
He wanted his grand history painting,

[00:24:44]
his painting of the House of Representatives,

[00:24:47]
he wanted that to be sort of American born rather than a European subject,

[00:24:51]
he wanted to sort of build on American history.

[00:24:52]
And you look at painting like Lloyd's Washington Crossing the Delaware.

[00:24:56]
I mean, there's a perfect example

[00:24:58]
of a big American history painting.

[00:25:01]
{SPEAKER name="Unknown Speaker"}
Did he study with Benjamin West?

[00:25:03]
{SPEAKER name="Ann Shumard"}
Yes, Benjamin West was there at the Royal Academy

[00:25:08]
and so he did indeed study with West.

[00:25:11]
{SPEAKER name="Unknown Speaker"}
And, what is the difference in the process between a tintype and a daguerreotype

[00:25:16]
and the later cartes de visite?

[00:25:17]
{SPEAKER name="Ann Shumard"}
-cartes de visite, ok, the daguerreotype is on a, as I said earlier, mentioned earlier,

[00:25:24]
on a silver-plated sheet of copper.

[00:25:27]
A Tintype is actually not on tin but on a thin piece of sheet iron.

[00:25:33]
And the difference is that a tintype actually, the chemistry is different,

[00:25:39]
it was a much cheaper process.

[00:25:42]
A tintype is actually, is actually a negative image

[00:25:48]
that is on a japanned piece of sheet iron that makes it appear positive.

[00:25:53]
I'm not probably giving you the best description.

[00:25:55]
Paper print photography from, first from paper negatives,

[00:26:00]
and then from glass negatives, comes into use in the United States in the 1850s.

[00:26:05]
The first negatives are paper negatives and those are used to create paper prints,

[00:26:10]
but they don't have the clarity and the definition.

[00:26:14]
You can imagine if you created a negative on a piece of paper,

[00:26:17]
it's going to have all of the characteristics of sort of the fiber of the paper.

[00:26:22]
And if you print from a paper negative, you get a very sort of diffused and soft,

[00:26:26]
almost sort of impressionistic image rather than a really sharp one.

[00:26:31]
When glass negative technology came in, in the mid 1850s,

[00:26:36]
that made it possible to print from a sharp and clear glass negative and make paper prints that

[00:26:43]
look like the kind of paper prints that we've gotten used to in our lifetime.

[00:26:50]
The real popularity of small paper prints,

[00:26:52]
so called cartes de visite, because they were,

[00:26:55]
the French word for calling card or visiting card is cartes de visite,

[00:27:00]
and the carte de visite format was approximately the same size as a calling card.

[00:27:06]
That became very popular in America really during the campaign,

[00:27:10]
Abraham Lincoln's campaign in 1860.

[00:27:13]
And, in fact, we have in the Face of Lincoln Exhibition,

[00:27:16]
an opportunity to see carte de visite portraits of Lincoln.