Mathew Brady at gettysburg

Abstract

Mathew Brady and his team of cameramen are thought to have arrived on the battlefield at Gettysburg sometime after 6th July 1863, and to have taken a series of about 30 views on or about 15th July¹. Of these, 11 were published in the form of wood engravmgs for Harper's Weekly, on 22nd August 1863.     

Jules Itier,Daguerreotypist

Abstract

Jules Itier's work with daguerreotypes is a recent discovery¹. A group of 40 examples has been acquired by the Musée de Bièvres (Essonne), and about 80 plates have been traced to a private collection. This body of work conveys the idea of travel photography as it was practised during the 1840s, although only a few examples of the genre survive². E. Lacan, a critic for La Lumière, commented at the time: ‘the application of daguerreotypy to travel offered more than one practical difficulty, and did not respond to the great need of our century, which was/or popuiarization’³. In the first place, the transportation of a considerable number of silvered plates during a long journey was cumbersome and costly and, above all, the images that were finally brought hack ⁴ were unique. It was possible to make an admirable private collection, but there was no practical way to share with the general public the fascinating views that had been captured in faraway places, often at great expense and with great effort.     

Early Serbian photography

Abstract

At the onset of the industrial revolution, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, while all civilized nations of the world were building up their tcchnological resources, Serbia was making its first attempts to free itself from Turkish occupation. When photography was announced in 1839, Serbia was a small country, still partly governed by Turkey. A newly formed class of city dwellers tried eagerly to make up, at an accelerated pace, for all that it had missed in culture and civilization while dominated by the Turks. In their efforts they were aided by numerous émigré Serbs from Vojvodina¹ who were invited and offered positions in government by Duke Milo: ObrenoviC (1780–1860). Many foreign craftsmen, skilled in newly developed techniques, arrived from Western Europe in search of higher earnings, and likewise participated in this cultural awakening.     

Original Talbot photographs in Estonia

Abstract

On the 25th September 1934, the Estonian newspaper Postimees published an interesting article concerning one of the founders of photography, W. H. F. Talbot.¹ Talbot's granddaughter, Miss Matilda Talbot, visited Estonia from the 17th September until the 1st October of that year, and the article was about her visit as well as her grandfather. She was the guest of Mrs Hünerson, Chief Commissioner of the Estonian Girl Guides, who had been in England that summer to attend a Girl Guide conference, and had been introduced to Miss Talbot at Lacock Abbey by a mutual acquaintance. Miss Talbot spent her time mainly at Tartu, but she also visited Petseri and Voru, small towns in southern Estonia, about 60 – 80 kilometres from that city. She was later to include a delightful account of her impressions of this Estonian holiday in one chapter of her memoirs.²     

Hall of Fame

Abstract

Samuel Carter Hall, a writer of small talent but enormous output, had a finger in every journalistic pie of mid 19th-century England. Christmas albums, temperance tracts and travel essays flowed from his pen; at his own conservative estimate, he and his wife edited and wrote between them over 500 books, from Gems of British Poets to files of Women's Trials ¹. As parliamentary reporter, literary critic, journalist and editor of a bewildering succession of magazines and newspapers, he swam in the mainstream of public life.     

Early photography in Eastern Europe

Abstract

At the session of the French Academy of Sciences held on 7th January 1839, D. F. Arago (1786–1853), secretary of the Academy, announced that the fixation of the picture seen in the camera obscura had been achieved. Hasznos Mulatságok, a Hungarian-language paper published in Pest, made its readers acquainted with Daguerre's invention in its issue of 2nd February, an extremely short time, considering the communication and travel conditions then prevailing. Newspaper stories of the new invention stimulated a lively interest among Hungarian readers, and the papers continued to feature reports on photography whenever the occasion warranted: In its 7th March issue, a Pest weekly, Athenaeum, published an article on daguerreotypy written by Jules Janin, a French journalist and art critic. Hungarian society accepted Janin's opinion and was prepared to welcome photography as an artistic expression of reality and truth.     

Book reviews

Abstract

A joint exhibition of Ansel Adams's Museum Set portfolio of seventy-five images plus one hundred photographs selected from his centennial project for the University of California, Fiat Lux, was due to open at the University of California, Irvine, on 8 January 1991. The installation of The Museum Set photographs was near completion when museum scientist and installation designer, Phyllis Lutjeans, noticed that Sequoia Gigantea Roots, Yosemite National Park, California, c.1950 (figures 1 and 2), plate number 55 in the exhibition catalogue,¹ was reversed, from the image hanging on the wall before her. Ms Lutjeans had been using the catalogue as a guide to affix labels for the exhibition.     

William Lake Price and James Mudd

Abstract

Photography, of course, appears everywhere but for all its successes it has been remarkably unable to shake the complacency of the disciplines; it has its uses and its places, but these seem just too setded and too well known. The photographer remains a junior partner in the practices of a society, high or low, cultural or otherwise. But if we travel back through time we will encounter a point when photography seemed anything but limited. If any spatial figure typifies English photographic debate in the 1860s it would be ‘boundless’. In the language of English photographic culture the idea that the potentials of the new medium were unlimited stretched from Lady Easdake to the juror's reports on the International Exhibitions. Out of this mass of commentary I intend to extract only two fairly ordinary pieces of writing: William Lake Price's A Manual of Photographic Manipulation published in 1868¹ and James Mudd's ‘A photographer's dream’, originally read at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and published in The Photographic News for May 1865.²     

Frances Benjamin Johnston 1864˜1952

Abstract

A short obituary in Time magazine, published in June 1952, marked the passing of one of America's foremost women photographers, whose death had occurred almost three months earlier, on 16th March 1952.     

John Thomson (1837–1921)

Abstract

Abstract Thomson did some of his most important work in Asia but was not, of course, the first European photographer to travel there. Thus, Eliphalet Brown, Jr. had accompanied Commodore Perry's expedition to Asia in 1852–1854. His daguerreotypes were reproduced by means of woodcuts and lithographs in the official report of the expedition. A Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan ¹. Felice Beato photographed the Crimean War of 1855 with James Robertson, continued eastward photographing India during the next five years, and then attached himself to the Anglo-French campaign against China. There he covered the capture of Fort Taku at Tiensin, and later the destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace north of Peking in October 1860. Thomson appeared on the site 10 years later. He photographed Fort Taku also, and noted that it ‘looked like a deserted mud quarry’².     

Joseph A. Maybin and Two Steamboat Wrecks

Abstract

Just after 10 a.m. on Monday 17th August 1885, as the steamboat S. M. Felton left its dock in Philadelphia headed for Wilmington, Delaware, an explosion ripped through its forward deck structure. Miraculously, no one was killed, although several people were injured. The ship returned to the dock and, after the passengers were disembarked, was towed to the Pusey & Jones Company in Wilmington for repairs. The ship's captain and others were convinced that the explosion had not been an accident, and that for some unknown reason a ‘veritable infernal device’ had been ‘smuggled’ on board and set to go off to make it look as if the boiler had exploded. No theory was advanced as to who would have done such a thing, although it was pointed out that the Felton was the archrival of the ship Brandywine. Since the two ships frequently left Philadelphia at the same time, races between them were common¹. Another good cause for speculation was the report in the Wilmington Every Evening less than two weeks before the explosion that the Felton charged a fare ‘so low that it is intended to drive all other boats from the river’². In the long run nothing came of these suspicions, and no one was ever convicted in the case, despite the work of a Captain Linden of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.     

Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

Ground state cooling,quantum state engineering and study of decoherence of ions in Paul traps

Abstract

We investigate single ions of ⁴⁰Ca⁺ in Paul traps for quantum information processing. Superpositions of the S_½ electronic ground state and the metastable D_5/2; state are used to implement a qubit. Laser light on the S_½ ? D_5/2 transition is used for the manipulation of the ion's quantum state. We apply sideband cooling to the ion and reach the ground state of vibration with up to 99.9% probability. Starting from this Fock state (n = 0), we demonstrate coherent quantum state manipulation. A large number of Rabi oscillations and a ms-coherence time is observed. Motional heating is measured to be as low as one vibrational quantum in 190ms. We also report on ground state cooling of two ions.     

Daniel Manders Beere

Abstract

Through History of Photography, photoarchivists at the National Photography Collection of the Public Archives of Canada have learned that one of Canada's photographic pioneers was among New Zealand's early photographers of note. An article by William Main entitled, ‘Photographic Reportage of the New Zealand Wars’¹, and subsequent correspondence from John Sullivan², have shed welcome light on the origins and later life of Daniel Manders Beere.     

A Novel Fullerene Hydroxamic Acid for the Liquid–Liquid Extraction,Separation, Preconcentration,and Spectrophotometric and ICP‐AES Determination of Vanadium

Abstract

A new reagent N‐phenyl‐(1,2 methanofullerene C₆₀)61‐formohydroxamic acid (PMFFA) is reported for extraction and trace determination of vanadium(V) in nutritional and biological substrates. The extraction mechanism of vanadium from 6 M HCl media is investigated. The influence of PMFFA, diverse ions, and temperature on the distribution constant of vanadium examined. The over all stability constant (log β₂ K _e ) and extraction constant (K _ex) are 20.89 ± 0.02 and 8.0 ± 0.02 × 10^?15, respectively in chloroform. The thermodynamics parameters are calculated and kinetics of vanadium transport is discussed. The system obeys Beer's law in the range of 3.2–64.0 ng mL^?1 of vanadium(V). The molar absorptivity is 7.96 × 10⁵ L mol^?1 cm^?1, at 510 nm. The PMFFA–vanadium(V) complex chloroform extract in chloroform was directly inserted into plasma for ICP‐AES measurement, which increases the sensitivity by 50 folds and obey Beer's law in the range of 50–1200 pg mL^?1 of vanadium(V). The method is applied for determination vanadium in real standard samples, sea water, and environmental samples.     

The darkroom abolish

Abstract

‘You press tlie button and we do the rest' had been Kodak's proud slogan slnce 1888, but as the success of popular pliotography grew, the wisdom of allowing hundreds of thousands of amateurs to do ‘the rest’ themselves became very clear. By 1902, the annuals sales of photographic paper alone had reached three million dollars¹, and Kodak's famous propaganda slogan was tacltly disowned with the publication of The Darkroom Abolished. In eloquent terms, and supported by the highest photographic authorities in the land, the notion came to be propagated that ‘You’ should not only press the button, but also ‘do tlie rest’ yourself. If ‘The Kodak Girl’ could do it, fragile and delicate woman that she was, anyone could. No mention here of the fact that at least 18 women were formal members of the Photo-secession in that year, or that two had been among the founders. The early years of this century were not, of course, attuned to these sensibilities; indeed, plctures of pretty girls selling enticing products like potassium ferrous oxalate to an eager publoc will be with us for a while yet. In the testimonials for the new products, Eickemeyer ranks discreetly above (or at any rate ‘before’) Stieglitz, and through the four quotations are almost on a par, one may guess that the layout of the brochure was more popular in some quarters than in others. And Edward W. Newcoinb, while equally positive, was evidently confused about the limits of human skill. Frederick Remington's endorsement must have been valued more for the sake of the artist's name than for its own persuasive qualities. His cautious tone notwithstanding, it is known that his own practice as an illustrator was shaped, at least in part, by the public's insistence on the kind of pictorial authenticity that only a pliotograph could sulpply².     

Lee Miller's photographic impersonations 1930-1945

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century some 300 photographers had visited Palestine, Jerusalem being a focal point of their activity. But 10 miles north of Jerusalem lay the small agricultural village of Ramallah. Few, if any, of the photographers who visited Jerusalem were interested in taking pictures ofRamallah, a village with no biblical associations whatever. But there was a compensating factor. As early as 1869, the Society of Friends, the Quakers, had established a girls' school in Ramallah; the boys' school followed in 1901. As a result, many friends from the US and England came to Ramallah to see and work in the mission they helped establish, and they often brought cameras with them. Thus, we have photographs of Ramallah that date as far back as 1889.     

Mendel John Diness of Jerusalem and Cincinnati

Abstract

I am 52 years of age. But my youth is still just behind me in that solid world of things that one was able to touch. One looked and touched simultaneously. At times one touched by stretching out one's hands without really seeing them, or by seeing them confusedly as if there were pupils, excessively dilated from emotion, at the tips of one's fingers. The passage of time has not dulled the strong physical emotions I experienced with my playmates; in those days a tiny animal was a bottomless well of marvels, and one stretched one's bow until it broke because that was the right way to test how much it could stand. No ‘wise’ advice on not drawing the bow so far as to destroy it could replace the cognitive pleasure of stretching the elasticity of the wood to breaking point. Too bad if the bow broke; the pain of loss was the inevitable corollary of a necessary audacity. After every game of pleasure a mini-Last Judgement arrived implacably from the outside world, perhaps followed by punishment and then tears, but in the end one had done what one had to do: dare!     

Effect of strain on formation of ultrafine ferrite in surface of hot rolled microalloyed steel

Abstract

The phenomenon of ultra grain refinement of ferrite in surface layers of hot rolled strip has been studied in a low carbon, niobium microalloyed steel. Wedge specimens were used, to vary the nominal equivalent strain applied during rolling from zero to approximately unity, and the cooling rate after rolling was varied from ~ 20 to 1 K s ^-1. In contrast with previous work, which contended that a very coarse austenite grain size and a low rolling temperature near the Ar ₃ were essential to obtain ultrafine ferrite in surface layers, such ultrafine layers were observed after rolling coarse austenite at up to 150 K above the Ar ₃ and after rolling fine grained austenite near the Ar ₃. In the case of coarse grained austenite, a critical nominal rolling strain needed to be exceeded to trigger the surface layer phenomenon, upon which cooling rate had little effect on the surface layer's grain size. Refining the prior austenite grain size had the further beneficial effect of refining the grain size at the centre of the rolled product, for example to 2·6 μm, while the surface layer was refined to 0·7 μm.