Untold lives blog

In the last of this series on William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), I look at his development of photoglyphic engraving the forerunner of what we today know as photogravure. The photogravure process involves the printing of a photographic image onto paper with ink using a plate onto which the image has been etched.

Talbot started his photoglyphic experiments primarily because he wanted to produce a photographic image which was not subject to fading as sometimes happened with his Calotype photographs. There had already been limited experiments with printing photographic images. As early as 1826, the Frenchman, Nicéphore (Joseph) Niépce (1765-1833) developed a process called héliogravure and there were some attempts to use Daguerreotype plates, the work of Hippolyte Fizeau (1819-1896) in particular being noteworthy. In both cases the results were extremely variable. The primary problem with reproducing a photograph as a printed image was the reliable reproduction of the intermediate tonal areas on the plate (known as halftones). In order to overcome the technical issues Talbot initially sought advice from master-engraver George Barclay (b. 1802) and in later years received advice from Thomas Brooker (1813-1885) and William Banks (b. 1809).

 
 ‘Proposed method of transferring Photography to Steel Engraving’. (28 November, 1847). Early notes regarding photo-engraving. (Add MS 88942/1/350). 

Talbot developed his process gradually taking out two patents, for photographic engraving (1852), and photoglyphic engraving (1858). It was this second patent that established the basis for photogravure. Talbot’s innovations included the use of potassium bichromate sensitized gelatin for fixing the photographic image to the plate and perhaps more importantly the use of a screen to enable the accurate reproduction of the halftone areas within an image. Both of these innovations are still used in non-digital reprographics today.

After encouragement from the editor William Crookes (1832-1921), Talbot allowed a series of his photoglyphic engravings to be published in Photographic News (22 October, 1858) although he used images by the French photographers Soulier and Clouzard, rather than his own. This increased public awareness of the process and drew praise from many people including Prince Albert (1819-1861). Talbot was asked to exhibit his work and won medals at the 1862 International Exhibition of London and at the 1865 Berlin International Photographic Exhibition.

One of two of Talbot’s photoglyphic engravings published posthumously in the second edition of Gaston Tissandier’s A History and Handbook of Photography (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1878). (Add MS 88942/3/1/21).

Unfortunately like many of his other ideas Talbot failed to develop photoglyphic engraving into a business and from 1865 he increasingly turned his attentions to Assyriology and mathematics instead. However Talbot’s work was instrumental in the development of the modern photogravure process, perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879 and still known to this day as the Talbot-Klič process.

  Part of a letter, with examples of photoglyphic engraving, sent by Paul Dujardin to Charles Henry Talbot (William Henry Fox Talbot’s son) in 1880. In his letter Dujardin praises Talbot’s process as superior to others and laments the fact that his name is not more widely known. (Add MS 88942/2/173).

Jonathan Pledge
Cataloguer, Historical Papers 

Further reading on William Henry Fox Talbot:
William Henry Fox Talbot; Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (Hutchinson Benham, 1977) by H. J. P. Arnold.
William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press, 2013), ed. by Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam.

It is necessary for a Physician when entering a city of which he knows nothing, to examine its exposure, the predominant winds, the seasons, the nature and elevation of the soil, the quality of the waters of which the inhabitants make use, and the kind of life they follow. – Hippocrates

This quotation introduces James Ranald Martin’s Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1837).  A couple of years prior to publication, Martin – then Presidency Surgeon of Bengal – had issued a call for members of the Indian Medical Service to compile medical topographical reports of regions across India, with a view to building a comprehensive picture of climate and disease throughout the sub-continent.

  James Ranald Martin by Barraud & Jerrard Photographers (1874), Images from the History of Medicine, US National Library of Medicine

Ideas about the relationship between environment, climate and disease dominated British attitudes to health in India throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.  Malaria was associated with miasmatic emissions [noxious vapours] from rotting vegetables and stagnant bodies of water; cholera had been linked with sudden changes in the weather; and the temperature and quality of the air in particular areas was thought to leave men in a weakened and docile state.  Through the compilation of medical topographies, Medical Officers could establish associations between locale and disease, designating and distinguishing between harmful and healthy areas to inform the location of hill stations and sanatoria.

 Sketch map with a view in some measure to illustrate the causes of physical climate, Medical Topography of Calcutta (1837)  

Descriptions for records relating to Medical Topography have been added to Search Our Catalogue Archives and Manuscripts as part of the IOMA project, and existing entries have been expanded and enhanced with authority records and indexing. 

Weather and mortality charts, Medical Topography of Jeypore (1895) 

In addition to published topographies, the records consist of consultations (and later proceedings) of the Presidency Governments and Government of India, documents from the Board of Control collections, and military reports.

Table of sanitary conditions, from IOR/F/4/2290/117907 (1847-48)

Alex Hailey
India Office Medical Archives Project 

Further reading:

J R Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1837)

Mark Harrison, Differences of Degree: Representations of India in British Medical Topography, 1820 – c1870, Medical History. Supplement, vol. 20 (2000), pp 51-69

T Holbein Hendley, A medico-topographical account of Jeypore (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1895)

On 14 March 1836, the German naturalist Doctor Johann Wilhelm Helfer and his wife, Baroness Pauline Desgranges, arrived on the banks of the Euphrates near Birecik in present-day Turkey. The couple were travelling from Prague to Calcutta, and had arranged to descend the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf on board a British steamship.

  Steamers Euphrates and Tigris passing Thapsacus. From Chesney, Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition (1868).

In his wife’s memoirs, Johann Helfer recalled the scene of ‘busy confusion’ that greeted them that morning: ‘Turks and Christians were seen everywhere, laden with the most various things, and all in such haste’. Scattered about the banks of the river were, amongst other things, anvils, bellows, gun carriages, wheels, cylinders, trunks and chests, astronomical instruments, tent poles, ‘and an immense quantity of planks’.

Laid up by the side of the river were two steamships, the Euphrates and the Tigris, both of which had been transported from Liverpool in kit form. British engineers took a year to assemble both vessels in preparation for what was to be the first navigation of the Euphrates by steamship, from Birecik to the Persian Gulf, a total distance of 1400 kilometres.

Cross section of the Euphrates. From Chesney, Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition (1868). 

In charge of the expedition was Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney who had occupied himself much with the question of establishing a trade route between Britain and India that avoided rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Chesney had negotiated the Euphrates by sail boat in 1834, and was confident that the great river was navigable by steamship.

Chesney’s project attracted the interest of the British Government. Since the Napoleonic wars, mail had travelled from India to London through the Persian Gulf, and then onwards, overland, through Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Syria. Government officials, reasoning that transporting goods along a similar route could bring great economic and practical advantages to the British Empire, awarded Chesney a grant of £25,000 (more than £2 million in present day terms) to undertake an expedition to establish a steamship route on the Euphrates.

The expedition’s progress downstream was slow, arduous, and not without tragedy. On 21 May 1836 a tornado wrought considerable damage upon both steamers,  causing the Tigris to sink with the loss of twenty-two hands. Finally, after three months, the Euphrates alone entered the Shatt-al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet the Persian Gulf.

 
Letter from Francis Rawdon Chesney, Commander of the Euphrates Expedition, to Samuel Hennell, Resident at Bushire, dated 16 February 1837 (IOR/R/15/1/73, ff 7-8). Item digitised as part of the Qatar Foundation-British Library Partnership Programme.

In his subsequent report to Government, Chesney insisted that his expedition had been a success, and that the Euphrates was navigable by steamship. However, a further expedition in 1841 concluded that, because of the numerous irrigation dams and other obstacles that emerged during the river’s low season, the Euphrates as a trade route was impractical. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 put an end to any ideas of transforming the Euphrates into a major trade route between Europe and Asia.

Mark Hobbs
Subject Specialist, Gulf History Project 

Qatar Digital Library

Further Reading:

IOR/R/15/1/70 ‘Book 96: Letters Inward 1837’

IOR/R/15/1/73 ‘Letters Inward 1837’.  For example - letter from Francis Rawdon Chesney to Samuel Hennell, Resident at Bushire, dated 16 February 1837, stating that the Governor in Council has sanctioned the expense of tombstones for the deceased men of the Euphrates expedition (IOR/R/15/1/73, ff 7-8)

Chesney, General Francis Rawdon. Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition carried on by Order of the British Government (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1868)

Pauline, Countess Nostitz. The Travels of Doctor and Madame Helfer in Syria, Mesopotamia and Burmah and Other Lands (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1878)

Rathbone Low, Charles. The History of the Indian Navy (1613-1863) (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1877)

Some readers of this blog will know that we at the British Library have spent the last few years developing an integrated catalogue for our archives and manuscripts collections which is made available online as Search our Catalogue Archives and Manuscripts.  A bonus of having all the catalogue records in one system is that we can now share them with projects en masse beyond the British Library, and this includes the 300,000 or so records of the people who were involved in the creation of, or who are the subject of, the archives and manuscripts.

These records then have been included in the US based Social Networks and Archival Context project – more memorably known as SNAC.  Part of this is looking at how to help researchers find all the relevant material relating to a particular person, both archives and publications and so has developed a ‘Prototype Research Tool’  with this in mind: 

 

 
The British Library’s records are included alongside those from many US institutions and data is being loaded from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and university repositories in the UK. Anyone can click one of the ‘featured’ images on the front page or search for an individual they are interested in. The result will be a page for an individual such as this entry for Robert Clive:

 Here information about related archive collections is presented with links back to the originating repository’s catalogue, where details of how to get access to the material can be found. There are also links to publications and other resources relating to the person with links to WorldCat  which again can help with accessing the material.

The project is also interested finding out if the links between people found in catalogues when they are brought together in this way might help researchers navigate around all this data, so as well as providing links to related people the project provides a visualisation for the social and professional ‘network’ of individuals in a ‘radial graph view’ such as this one again for Robert Clive:

 

Given the richness of the catalogues and the millions of records included links can be found to the humble individual as well as the ‘great and the good’, so here can be seen a link between Lord Clive and one Mrs Bayly Brett, whose commonplace book includes a copy of a letter written by him to his mother in 1757.

Please have a look at SNAC and tell us what you think. Happy hunting!

Bill Stockting
Cataloguing Systems & Processing Co-ordinator

“Copy despatches to India on the results of the final examinations” - a somewhat dry description of a file from the Public Works Department of the India Office.  It obscures the fact that the contents offer fascinating glimpses into the world of late Victorian technical education and the talents (or lack thereof) of the young men who underwent training in Britain before taking up positions in India. They passed through various courses of instruction at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill in Surrey, which opened in 1872.

IOR/V/25/700/1 Results of first year exams Cooper's Hill 1872

Engineering theory had to be allied to practical experience, so the students were seconded to various projects lasting ten months in workshops all over the country. During this time they were encouraged to go on other work-related visits, with some travelling to France, Belgium and Holland. They were not given free rein, however, as these entries dating from 1879  sent to, and recorded by, the College authorities show:

‘F.D. FOWLER. Where employed: under T.J. Nicholls, Esq., on the new line of railway from Manchester to Bury and Bolton … Remarks: Mr. Fowler showed in the first half of his course no disposition to acquire for himself knowledge of practical details, although he had every facility for so doing. His notes, also, were very slovenly and so disconnected as to be of little use hereafter. Since then he has done better … Mr. Nicholls speaks very well of him.’

‘P.L.A. PRICE. Where employed: at the Patent Shaft and Axletree Company’s works at Wednesbury … Leave: Mr. Price has strained the leave rules to the fullest, and on one occasion absented himself from the works, without leave, for four days. Remarks: Mr. Price is evidently not a hard working man. He is a good draughtsman, but he has failed to see the reason of being sent to works for a practical course, and has considered the course as much a task as being tied to hours at school. His special report is good, so far as it goes, but is unfinished.’

‘E.R.S. LLOYD. Where employed: … with Mr. Moorsom at the Manchester Central Station … Remarks: Mr. Lloyd wishes to do well and works, but he is reserved and seems afraid to act for himself. Consequently he is not inquisitive, and so omits making notes of details because he would have to get the information from someone else.’

Fortunately by no means all the students attracted negative comments. K.H. Stephen, who spent six months at Preston and then four at Chatham, never taking any leave, and who “ … has worked very hard and has made good use of his time. He [is] spoken of very highly … “. His Notes “are very good and profusely illustrated … The special report on manufacture of cement is good.”

 
IOR/V/25/700/1 Practical experience for third year students Cooper's Hill 

The date span of the volume is 1874 through to 1901. It records the provinces and departments to which the successful candidates were assigned, and even the names and dates of the ships which took them eastwards as they began their careers.

Three other volumes in the series include birth certificates, application papers, details of parentage and educational standard, and dates of admission and leaving, a reminder of the amazing wealth of biographical information to be found within the nooks and crannies of the India Office Records. 

Hedley Sutton
Asian and African Studies Reference Team Leader 

Frank Dashwood Fowler (1855-1940) worked on the railways in India and was married in Simla in 1896.

Petley Lloyd Augustus Price (1856-1910) played rugby for England before he went to India as an engineer. He later moved to Canada.

Edward Robert Stanford Lloyd (d.1923) retired to Hove in Sussex.  He took out a patent in 1914 on his invention of a treatment to make fabric water resistant.

Kent Hume Stephen (1856-1907) worked on irrigation in Bengal and retired to Sevenoaks in Kent.

Further reading:

IOR/L/PWD/8/10-13 Cooper's Hill students: admissions and final examinations 1871-1903.

IOR/V/25/700/1-25 Calendars for Royal Indian Engineering College Cooper's Hill 1873/4-1902/3.

find my past - use the British India Office collections to trace family histories for the men of Cooper's Hill

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a Victorian scholar who is today best known for the invention of photography, specifically the process whereby a negative is used to make any number of positive images onto photographic paper.

 
British Library: Fox Talbot Collection  

What is perhaps not so well known is that Talbot excelled in and made significant contributions to many diverse fields of research including Assyriology, astronomy, botany, etymology, mathematics, philology, photography, photolithography, and science.  He also found time for a short political career, business ventures, management of the family estate and raising a family.

The British Library has catalogued Talbot’s notebooks plus 4,000 additional items including books, pocket notebooks, pamphlets, published papers, patents, loose notes, printers’ proofs, accounts, invoices, receipts, herbaria and other material. These additional items will soon be released to researchers and Untold Lives will be highlighting material showing different sides of Talbot and his life and times.  We start today with Talbot’s short political career.

Although Talbot was only involved in politics from 1832 to 1835, those years were a time of great social and political change in England. Standing as a candidate for parliamentary reform in the 1831 election, Talbot received just 39 votes. However, this was out of a total number of 129 entitled voters so the result was deemed a success by political reformers and a song was written in his honour.  

 British Library: Fox Talbot Collection 

  British Library: Fox Talbot Collection
Talbot’s copy of the 1831 electoral result with those who voted for him highlighted in red. There was no secret ballot so those eligible to vote could be bribed or coerced especially if the candidate was their landlord.

The 1831 Parliamentary reform bill failed and another election was held in 1832. Talbot was elected supporting the reformist Whig government. From 1832 to 1834 several important bills were passed including the Reform Act of 1832 which extended the voting franchise; the Agricultural Labourers Act 1832 which regulated wages and set a minimum wage; and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

  British Library: Fox Talbot Collection  This document dated 5 April 1831 shows that one of the ideas of the Reform Act of 1832 had already been decided upon - the right to vote depending up on the ownership of property to the value of £10. Though this bill was much criticised it did extend the voting franchise and paved the way for further reforms.

British Library: Fox Talbot Collection  The list of wages for employable people, at the bottom of the page, includes boys as young as 10.

British Library: Fox Talbot Collection  Slavery Abolition Act 1833 The document calls for Talbot’s attendance in Parliament for the slavery vote and hints at the machinations of political life at the time.

Interference from King William IV meant that several governments were formed and then dissolved in quick succession 1832-1834. In this speech made in 1834 Talbot warns of economic and social damage resulting from this instability and the threat this poses to the effective implementation of the reforms just passed.

British Library: Fox Talbot Collection

Talbot became disillusioned with politics and when an election was called in 1835 he declined to stand for re-election and thereafter maintained only a mild interest in politics.

Jonathan Pledge
Cataloguer, Historical Papers 

Louis Pasteur was born on this day in 1822. How appropriate that a man who did so much to prevent disease was born at a time when gifts are traditionally exchanged, and unwittingly, germs! Pasteur’s outstanding research uncovering major causes of disease, and his development of vaccination methods, were hugely important in improving human and animal health.

His work attracted international interest so it comes as no surprise to find that veterinary surgeons from India visited his laboratory in Paris. The India Office Records include a report by J Hallen, veterinary surgeon to the Government of India, on his visit to Louis Pasteur's laboratory in Paris during 1884 and 1885. This report was commissioned as part of the Government of India’s drive to reduce the incidence of disease in cattle. Hallen describes Pasteur’s innovative method of vaccinating sheep, cattle and horses against anthrax.

This illustration from the report shows a sheep demonstrating remarkable fortitude when faced with some fearsome-looking medical equipment!

The investigation into the work of Pasteur's laboratory is a good example of the care taken by the administrators in India to keep abreast of professional practices, as they gathered information from centres of expertise across the world. Pasteur Institutes were established in India and their annual reports for the early twentieth century can be found in the India Office Records.

Penny Brook
Lead Curator, India Office Records

Further reading:

R Axelby and SP Nair Science and the changing environment in India 1780-1920: a guide to sources in the India Office Records (The British Library, 2010)

India Proceedings. Civil Veterinary Administration: Cattle Breeding and Cattle Disease, 1885 
IOR/P/2524

The cinchona plant was introduced from South America to India in 1860: a response to urgent need.  The Government of India was in search of a cheap drug for malaria, a disease that killed millions of people in India every year.  The most effective treatment was quinine, a chemical compound found in cinchona bark.

“Chinchona plants at Ootacamund”: frontispiece to Clements R Markham, Travels in Peru and India (London, 1862)

Cinchona plantations were established across the Nilgiri Hills in southern India, where they quickly flourished.  By the end of 1866 the superintendent of plantations, William McIvor, was able to report a total of 1,785,303 plants under cultivation.

But McIvor came into conflict with his employers.  He had devised a technique to increase the quinine yield, known as ‘mossing’.  Under this system, strips of bark were carefully removed and the exposed trunk was swaddled in moss (see illustration).  When the bark grew back again, it produced more quinine because it was thicker than before.

'Mossing’ from Parliamentary Papers 1866: 53 (“Papers relating to the introduction of the Chinchona Plant into India”, p. 500)

McIvor tried to patent the technique.  Aggrieved by his appointment as a mere cultivator rather than as a scientist, he argued that Government had no claim over his scientific expertise. It was this, he insisted, that had enabled him after many long experiments to ‘render this great natural process entirely subservient to my will’. With quinine increasingly in demand on the London markets, he had a clear incentive to make the claim.

Government officials disagreed. They argued that what McIvor was trying to patent was a process of nature. In summing up the case, they raised the wider and ever-pertinent question: was drug research being conducted for private profit or the public good?  Their answer was emphatic:
Prejudice to the public would be caused by enabling a public servant, employed for the special purpose of increasing and cheapening the supply to the public of a rare and costly drug, to use the information and experience which he had acquired in the public service and at the public cost for his individual benefit and to the public detriment, by making his charge for the use of his patent an element in the market price of the medicine, and tending to restrict the use of the medicine by adding to its cost.

The India Office Records holds several files on the Nilgiri cinchona experiment, as it was known.  These are on-line (search under ‘cinchona’).

Antonia Moon
Curator, post-1858 India Office Records 

Further reading:
Clements R Markham, Peruvian Bark: a popular account of the introduction of chinchona cultivation into British India, 1860-1880 (London, 1880)