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Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2015

Chitra Ramalingam
Chitra Ramalingam*
Affiliation:
Yale University E-mail: chitra.ramalingam@yale.edu
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Argument

This article explores the entangled histories of three imaging techniques in early nineteenth-century British physical science, techniques in which a dynamic event (such as a sound vibration or an electric spark) was made to leave behind a fixed trace on a sensitive surface. Three categories of “sensitive surface” are examined in turn: first, a metal plate covered in fine dust; second, the retina of the human eye; and finally, a surface covered with a light-sensitive chemical emulsion (a photographic plate). For physicists Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone, and photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, transient phenomena could be studied through careful observation and manipulation of the patterns wrought on these different surfaces, and through an understanding of how the imaging process unfolded through time. This exposes the often-ignored materiality and temporality of epistemic practices around nineteenth-century scientific images said to be “drawn by nature.”

Type
Topical Section: Surfaces in the History of Modern Science: Inscribing, Separating, Enclosing
Information
Science in Context , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 317 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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