An  advanced level English resource.

William Fox Talbot and the origins of photography

    
  Digital photography, which most of us use now in our daily life, is a very new process. Even in the year 2000, very few people owned a digital camera, and the digital cameras that existed in 2000 were not very powerful. But if digital photography is a new process, so too is photography itself, as it has existed for less than 200 years. It all dates back to a process discovered in about 1835  by a man called William Henry Fox Talbot, who is now known as the father of photography.
  William Fox Talbot was not a professional photographer;  he was just a very clever man — a genius, some people said.  He was born in 1800 in the west of England. A very good pupil at school, he was sent by his parents to Cambridge University where he was a brilliant student.
    Universities were different in those days, and Fox Talbot  studied a lot of different things: classics, foreign languages,  Hebrew, botany, chemistry and mathematics were among them!  And he did well in everything he studied. By the time he was  31, he had been elected as a member of the Royal Society,  that is the British academy of sciences.
    During the 1830's, he travelled a lot in Europe, visiting  many historical sites. As he travelled, he drew lots of pictures,  because he studied each site he visited. To help him draw quickly and accurately, he used a camera obscura.
    As a scientist, Fox Talbot knew that some chemicals are  sensitive to light. And like a few other of his contemporaries,  he began to look for a way to use these light-sensitive chemicals to "fix" the image from his camera obscura. He decided  to try impregnating paper with chemicals, so that the image  could be automatically reproduced on the paper.
    In 1839, a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, announced that  he had succeeded in fixing an image. His process was very complicated, using metal plates and a collection of chemicals  including iodine, bromine, silver, sodium thiosulphate, and  others too. His process was called the daguerrotype.
    As soon as Daguerre made his announcement, Fox Talbot announced that he had already discovered a different  process which worked.    While Daguerre’s process produced a positive image on  metal, Fox Talbot's produced a negative image on impregnated  paper. He called it a calotype. A positive image could be  produced by making a "contact" image from the first negative.
     The calotype process was a bit simpler than the daguerrotype; and though both systems were used for several years, the  latter finally disappeared, and the negative/positive process  discovered by Fox Talbot became the international standard.
    Fox Talbot's original process was faster than the daguerrotype, but developing took a long time. Within forty years, other  people had improved it, and the art of photography had become  common throughout Europe and North America.
    The black-and-white photos on this page were taken over 150 years ago, but some professional photographers are still using Fox Talbot's black-and-white photography process today.
  For most of us however, photography in the twenty-first century is entirely different. Digital photography, using a camera or a mobile phone, is entirely electronic. And unlike Fox Talbot's process, it is immediate. We immediately see the photo we have taken... there's no need to wait a few days or a few weeks, in order to see the result.    What would William Fox Talbot have said of today’s  mobile phone cameras, with high-resolution colour capacity, auto-focus, a zoom lens, and a  built-in flash?   

 



WORD GUIDE
process: method, technique - date back to: come from-  genius: very clever person - classics: Latin and Greek - site: place - sensitive to: affected by -  impregnate with: cause to absorb, fill with - which worked:  which was successful - standard: norm, usual method - lens: optical glass  

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Student Worksheet

►See also: additional  IELTS reading practice test  for this text.

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IELTS-style reading / listening comprehension exercise. Decide which of these statements are true and which are false:

Complete this extract from the text, insert  an article (a, an or the) whenever necessary – but only when necessary !

For teachers:

Technical language:

Note the use of technical language in this article. The  article exercise above is related to this.

Note the expressions light sensitive and sensitive to light. Can students think up other pairs of words which might behave in a similar manner.
  Here are some possible answers: heat resistant, smoke activated, temperature sensitive, radio controlled, colour coded, shock resistant, coin operated, shock absorbing, etc.

if you like, give your students a list of such words in separate elements, and ask them to connect them (one blue word + one red word) in as many ways as they can logically do so.
Here is an example of words to pair up : you can expand this exercise to include lots more pairs.

Intonation: note the stress patterns of the words pho ‘tography / pho’tographer/ photo ‘graphic and ‘photograph.
Students can be excused for feeling confused! Can they indicate the correct position of the stress in other technical words in the text?    For the main rules on word stress in English, see the Word stress grammar page.

How difficult is this article ?

The Flesch-Kincaid and IELTS scores for this text both exaggerate its difficulty in the context of an EFL or ESL class. Almost by definition, technical texts use "difficult" technical words, words that are not part of everyday conversational English.  However, what is difficult when compared to everyday English may actually be easy vocabulary for students in the EFL or ESL context, as many technical words are the same in many, ir not all, languages. So a word like negative is understandable by speakers of many languages, even if they know no English.


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Fully revised and updated 2020 . Originally published in Freeway.
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