The photographic experiments of Henry Brougham

Abstract

Of all the British claimants to the invention of photography, Henry Brougham is the one whose experiments have been given least attention in existing histories of photography. In his posthumously published three-volume autobiography of 1871, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, written by himself, Brougham claimed to have engaged in some ‘experiments upon light and colours’ during the years 1794-–5 (when he was 16 years of age). He had, he tells us, included a discussion of his experiments in a paper offered to the Royal Society in 1795. Most of this paper, his first in the field of natural philosophy, was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions (No. 86) of 1796 under the title ‘Experiments and observations on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light’. The paper, as published, was an attempt to discover analogous relationships between the bending of light within bodies (refraction or, using the 18th-century term, ‘refrangibility’) and the bending of light outside of bodies (reflection and diffraction or, in Brougham's terminology, flexion). As he wrote in the opening lines of his paper:

It has always appeared wonderful to me, since nature seems to delight in those close analogies which enable her to preserve simplicity and even uniformity in variety, that there should be no dispositions in the parts of light, with respect to inflection and reflection, analogous or similar to their different refrangibility. In order to ascertain the existence of such properties, I began a course of experiments and observations, a short account of which forms the substance of this paper.¹     

Peter Henry Emerson

Abstract

In his recent study, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary sees the writings on perception by the German physician, physiologist, and mathematician, Hermann von Helmholtz, as part of an epistemic shift, the emergence of what Crary terms a ‘modernizing vision’.¹ His study proposes that ‘during the first few decades of the nineteenth century a new kind of observer took shape in Europe radically different from the type of observer dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’.² Helmholtz's thcory of perception contributes to this emergence of a ‘new observer’, a theory in which sight is no longer severed from the body. Helmholtz's account of a corporealizcd encounter with the phenomenal world marks a shift from the notion of a static monocular eye organizing our sensory experience and constitutes the notation of an autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject. Light, for example, is shown to be produced not from without but in darkness, the mere effect of the stimulation of nerve ends by electrical impulses.³ Such a theory highlighted not only the significance of the body in perception but an interrelationship between the senses. The sense of sight could be triggered by physical contact; a blow to the eye created light, made one see ‘stars’.