William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) was born in Dorset, England in 1800 and, as expected of a person of his social class, gained an excellent education at Harrow and Cambridge. A talented mathematician, classicist, linguist, scientist and botanist, his invention of the 'calotype' arose out of his unsuccessful attempts to produce good pencil sketches using the popular artists' aids of the period - the camera obscura and the camera lucida. In 1834, at his ancestral home of Lacock Abbey he began a series of systematic photographic experiments in an attempt to solve the technical problems that had been encountered by previous scientists who had experimented with creating an accurate, reflected image that could be 'fixed' when created. He achieved initial success by using a combination of common salt and silver nitrate soaked into paper, allowing it to become sufficiently light-sensitive to capture an image.In 1839, French photographer Louis Daguerre's new invention, the daguerrotype, was presented to the French Academy of Arts and Sciences and quickly established itself as the leading form of photography.In reaction, Talbot presented his own experiments of 'photogenic drawings' with Michael Faraday at the Royal Institute in the same month.