Read Ebook: The Alumni Journal of the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York Vol. II No. 2 February 1895 by Various Kraemer Henry Editor

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Editor: Henry Kraemer

THE Alumni Journal

Entered at the New York Post Office as second class matter.

February, 1895.

Contents.

EDITORIAL--THE ABILITY OF CONSTRUCTION, 41

NEW LITERATURE, 43

THE MOST RECENT WORK, 47

NOTES HERE AND THERE, 48

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, 48

COLLEGE NOTES, 49

SENIOR CLASS NOTES, 50

JUNIOR NOTES, 51

OFFICINAL OR OFFICIAL, 55

PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

The Connecting Link

between the crisis and the complete recovery from an acute disease, that period known as convalescence, can often be considerably shortened by a judicious attention to the patient's nutrition. The battle has indeed been won, but the soldier is left prostrate upon the field.

Liquid Peptonoids

provides a valuable auxiliary for his up building because it is a liquid food-agent possessing a powerful reconstructive action while at the same time it is slightly stimulating in its primary effects. It is entirely pre-digested and in an absolutely aseptic condition. In convalescence, Doctor, give your patient LIQUID PEPTONOIDS

THE ARLINGTON CHEMICAL CO., Yonkers, N. Y.

THE Alumni Journal

PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

"THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY."

BY PROF. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, PH.D., F.C.S.

The topic of my lecture this evening is one of my old hobbies, so that if I am a little prolix sometimes you must pardon me. It is something in which I have been more or less interested for the last twenty-five years, and, like most of our hobbies, we sometimes drive them to death, to the discomfort of other people.

The fundamental ideas upon which photography is based are very old--older than the Christian era, certainly. They depend upon two facts: First--that light, in passing through a small opening, produces an inverted image in a dark chamber. Imagine, for instance, that you are in a dark chamber, outside of which is an object; that there is in the chamber a small hole a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch in diameter, and that you have in this dark chamber a piece of paper. Upon that paper you will get a picture of the object opposite the hole. That was known a long time ago. The other fact is that certain salts of silver, notably the chloride, iodide and bromide of silver, are sensitive to light and become blackened by light, was known to the Egyptians. The action of light upon colored bodies must have been known to the very earliest observers among men. The bronzing of the human skin under the tropical sun must have been noted by every one; and it is on record, in the most ancient annals of the human race, that men--the fair men from the North--when they went to the tropics, returned with tanned skins. Ptolemy, over two thousand years ago, noted that beeswax was bleached in sunlight, and the old Greeks noted that the gems which we call opal and amethyst lost their colors when exposed to sunshine. These are some of the first and most rudimentary notions upon the actions of light, and we have no definite statements about making pictures without light. The Chinese have a tradition--and they have a great many curious ones that are often founded on facts--that the sun makes pictures upon the ice of lakes and rivers.

A Frenchman, named Fontamen, wrote an imaginary voyage to a strange country, and among other things he said that objects were reflected upon the water and when the water was frozen the images were retained. So this idea of certain surfaces being capable of receiving impressions by means of light was very ancient. There was another Frenchman, named Devique Delaroche, who made a still more curious statement. In 1760 he wrote a book in which his hero is wrecked upon a strange coast, and the spirits of that place showed him how to make pictures, as he called it, "painted by nature." It is not quite sure what he means, but his words are something like these: "You know," says his guide, "that rays of light are reflected from different bodies and form pictures. The spirits have sought to fix these pictures, and have a subtle matter by which these pictures are formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat canvas with this peculiar matter, and hold it before the object." The manner of holding it is not stated. "The canvas is then removed to a dark place and in an hour the impression is dry and you have a picture, the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness." These words were written one hundred and fifty years ago. This, as far as we know, was purely imagination; yet the idea--the germ of photography--was there. We shall presently see that this flight of fancy on the part of Delaroche was very near the truth, and foretold what has since become possible, and only a very short time after he said it.

As time went on and observations of men became more definite, we obtain records of facts that were noted with regard to the action of light upon certain chemical compounds. You know those old alchemists had queer ideas, one in regard to their elixir of life, and another that they could turn the baser metals into gold. They discovered a material in the silver mines of the Hartz Mountains which they called "luna cornea." The word luna was at that time applied to silver. Luna cornea was horn silver--what we know to-day as silver chloride. They noted that when this was first brought from the mine it was white and that after it had been exposed to the air and the sunlight it turned black, and they also noticed that it was only the surface that turned black--that if they scraped the surface off it was white underneath. They also found that if they kept it in the mine it did not get black. This observation was made about 1550 by Frobrishes, one of the early workers in chemistry; but you must remember that they were not studying the action of light upon this substance. Their sole object was the turning of the baser metals into gold, and therefore they did not pay much attention to this idea, although this fact was placed on record.

While they were experimenting in England, a man named Niepse, a Frenchman, was at work upon the same subject--the action of light upon various materials, but in a somewhat different direction. In 1813, or probably before that time, he discovered that certain kinds of bitumen were soluble in oil of lavender, and that when you exposed these pieces of bitumen to some light the oil of lavender would not dissolve them any more. He conceived the idea , but he thought that if he could coat plates with this bitumen and then expose them to light in a camera he could get a picture upon this bitumen, and where the light had acted the bitumen would be insoluble in oil of lavender. Where the light had not acted that he could dissolve it out. He proceeded to do this, and succeeded in getting pictures upon metal plates. He then, afterwards, etched the plates and thus got a perfect drawing or picture. So he used it simply as a means to produce a picture by etching. Now, understand, using the camera, he obtained an impression upon metal plates coated with bitumen. After exposing the plates in the camera he washed them in oil of lavender and then an etching fluid, and cut the impression into the matter and then they were printed. Some of these pictures are still in existence, they say. I have never seen any of them. After a time the plates were cleaned, and by the help of an etcher's tools or an engraver's tools they were cut still deeper and made very good engraving plates; so that his object was not simply to etch them but to produce plates for engraving.

While this was going on Herschel made an important discovery in 1819, and that was that chloride and bromide and iodide of silver were not soluble when blackened by light. He found that after you had exposed these materials to the light--this silver iodide, bromide or chloride--and had washed all these with hypophosphite of sodium, they would not dissolve. That was important. That made it possible to preserve the silhouette pictures devised or discovered by Wedgewood and Vueder. Therefore, after exposing the plates in the camera, as did Niepse, the Frenchman, he washed them in a solution of hypophosphite of sodium. That took off the chloride of silver that was not acted upon by the light and he preserved the pictures. Some of the first pictures that he made were rather curious. I have not one of his original pictures; I wish I had, but I have a picture made in the same manner. He took a piece of paper and saturated it with salt . This was soaked in chloride of sodium or common salt, and then it was dipped and had flowed over it nitrate of silver. Therefore he had in the pores of the paper chloride of silver in very intimate contact with the paper. Then he took such objects as ferns and pieces of paper, cut it in various shapes, and laid it on the paper. That produced such an effect as where the objects had laid they had the white impression. If you took this out in the sunlight it would all get black. But he made this important discovery and thus preserved the picture. This was the first photograph made. We do that to-day, and produce other pictures with various other compounds, but I will speak of that later.

Sometime afterwards a man named Fitsherbert, a Frenchman, conceived the idea of changing this peculiar picture in silver plate into a gold picture. In other words, he put into the plate a little chloride of gold and produced a daguerreotype which can be seen pretty clearly by looking squarely at it.

Now, various modifications of Fox Talbot's process, were brought out, and a man named LaGray, I think conceived the idea of making these pictures more transparent by waxing them. That was the first good negative we had. It was a modification of Fox Talbot's idea, only he waxed the paper. Then about the same time it was found that a mixture of chloride of iron and cyanide of potassium, when mixed together were acted upon by light. Herschel discovered this, and that was the way we obtained the blue print, which is far older than the photograph. Sir John Herschel found that a mixture of chloride of iron and cyanide of potassium, when exposed to sunlight made Prussian blue. So that if you take paper and coat it with this mixture and then expose it under a negative you get a blue picture.

Now, a few years before another discovery was made. Remember that this was in 1848 that Niepse worked with the albumen process. In 1840, Schurben, a Swiss chemist, discovered gum cotton. This gum cotton is a nitrated compound of cotton, made by the action of concentrated sulphuric and nitric acids upon cotton. Sometime afterwards Maynard, a Yankee, in Boston, discovered that this gum cotton was soluble in alcohol, and ether, and then he found that by evaporating the substance he got the thin film of collodion. Scott Archer, an Englishman, conceived the idea of using this film as a vehicle for these particularly sensitive silver salts for photographing. His method was pretty much that which is followed to-day and that is still in use to quite a large extent.

In this process we have this series of operations: First, the plate must be perfectly clean. That is essential. Any little spot upon it will form a nucleus which will spread over the surface of the plate. The plate is then coated with albumen and allowed to dry without heating. It is then flowed with this collodion, and in the collodion is put the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver, which you need. It is generally the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver. This collodion is afterwards dipped into a silver bath, and then we get the sensitized silver surface, very thin and perfectly transparent. It is then ready to go into the camera. It is put into the camera soaking wet with nitrate of silver. It is exposed and then developed with a solution of sulphate of iron with some acetic acid. After it is developed, the developer is washed off, fixed with hypophosphite of sodium, dried, varnished and we get the negative.

Now, the curious part about this wet plate process is that it is slow. The compounds are not very sensitive compared with the modern compounds. In the second place it is essential to use it wet. If you took the plate out of the silver bath where you sensitized it and washed off the nitrate of silver adhering to it and put the plate in the camera you would not get a picture. The silver nitrate is essential to the production of the picture. It acts in this way: Where the light has acted upon the sensitive silver compounds and you proceed to develop the picture, when you mix the sulphate of iron and pour the developer upon the plate, as the iron comes in contact with the nitrate of silver, with which the plate is wet, it produces metallic silver, which adheres to those parts of the picture which have been acted upon by the light. That seems to be the philosophy, because if you wash the nitrate off you cannot develop a picture upon such a plate.

Now, this process of photography revolutionized the daguerreotype, revolutionized photography and the daguerreotype became obsolete. I think it displaced the daguerreotype in three years. This process was such an advantage--collodion was such a nice substance to work with--that it revolutionized the photography of those days, and the daguerreotype fell out of existence.

Now, when you take into consideration the time that people had to sit for their pictures--five or six minutes--you can conceive how hard it was to keep still. They had such queer contrivances to keep the head straight, they screwed you up in various positions, and this was particularly exasperating where they had to take pictures requiring a good deal of time. Dr. Draper, who took some of these daguerreotypes, and who I believe was the first photographer of these pictures, desired to take a photo of his estimable lady. His studio was in the old University Building in Washington Square. I believe Mrs. Draper had to sit twenty minutes for that picture. In order to produce the best effect he had a tank made in the top of the laboratory so as to produce a blue light. Mrs. Draper was very patient while he was at work with this, and unfortunately, Dr. Colton tells me, the result was two pictures on the same plate. I should think it would. That was the first effort ever made to take the human face with the daguerreotype. Of course, with all that paraphernalia, with that slowness of action, anything that worked within a minute was considered wonderful, and that was practically what happened when Scott Archer discovered collodion.

This wet plate process continued from 1851 to 1871, about twenty years. I have the pleasure of showing you an amateur outfit for this process, used in 1860 to take to the Rocky Mountains . That is an amateur outfit carried over the Rocky Mountains in 1860 to take pictures. Here is the old tank that carried the water. Here are some of the bottles of chemicals, and the way it was managed was this: This was hooked up, on the end of these sticks. This was the black cloth used as the developing room by the operator. Here is a little window with yellow glass to develop the pictures. The plates and bromide of silver was carried in these two boxes. That was carried on top of the mule and the boxes on the sides of the mule, so that he had a pretty good mule.

Now, to-day we do the same work with that apparatus , and a great deal better work it is.

In 1871 a more important revolution took place even than the wet plate process or the daguerreotype. Many efforts had been made to overcome the use of the wet plate--the plate wet with nitrate of silver, and some of the efforts were very successful but usually troublesome. The plate was kept moist in a variety of ways: by honey, by tea, by infusion of tea, by beer, by coffee, and a multitude of all the funniest concoctions you could think of, but the process was destined to fail.

In about 1870 it was conceived that you could make an emulsion of these peculiar compounds of silver--these sensitive silver compounds--that you could make an emulsion that you could pour upon the plate and produce a picture just when you pleased, and it was found that by mixing the chloride that produces the sensitive material in one portion of your collodion and putting nitrate of silver into another portion of the collodion, in certain proportions, you could produce a collodial emulsion. They had to be mixed in just exactly the right proportions, so as not to have an excess of nitrate of silver or an excess of bromide.

But that process failed and only lasted a few years; although I have here one of the plate holders used by such a process.

This was between the time of the wet plate process and the modern dry plate, when they used collodial bromide emulsion. It was a kind of a compromise between the wet plate and the dry plate. In 1871, Dr. R. L. Maddox, of Bath, England, had the idea that he would use gelatine, instead of albumen or collodion, as a vehicle to hold these silver salts upon the glass surface, and he found, among other things, something that surprised him--that when he put the silver salts in to contact with this gelatine they became wonderfully more sensitive than ever before.

The idea is this: That you make a gelatine mixture of a certain strength--the proportions required a certain amount of soft gelatine and a certain amount of hard gelatine. Into that gelatine you pour, with constant stirring; you pour a mixture at the same time--some particular bromide, generally bromide of potassium and nitrate of silver--in a very thin stream and keep it thoroughly stirred up. If you go too fast, you will not get the right result; but the result is, when you get through and do it right, you get a beautiful milky fluid, and that fluid contains bromide of silver in a wonderful state of suspension--very thin--and it remains suspended in this fluid. Now let that set--this cream or "emulsion," as they call it--and you have as a result iodide of silver and iodide of potassium. You let the emulsion set and it produces a jelly, that jelly is then cut up into shreds, rubbed through a sieve or something of that kind to make it thoroughly divided, and washed thoroughly with water. Having done that it can be melted, and if you melt it and heat it to a certain temperature, there does not seem to be any limit to the sensitiveness of the material. If you use it cold it requires a second or two to produce a picture. If you cook it, however, you will find that it will become more and more sensitive to light, until it is actually possible to take a picture of a projectile traveling four hundred metres per second. I have such a picture. The only trouble is that some of the plates made are so sensitive to light that we cannot get a light non-active enough to develop them. Having these bromide plates then in the camera--this sensitive material coated on these glass plates in the camera--you have got to be very careful that the light does not get to them. The consequence is that the plate holders are made with extreme care.

The result of this gelatine-bromide of silver process is this: that we can have plates in packages. We can put these emulsion plates and carry them off where we please, and, what is still more important, we can put the emulsion upon very thin material, and I have here thin sheets of celluloid upon which this emulsion has been spread and pictures taken. That is not all, either; they can make it still thinner they can put it on a roll and in this camera is one of those rolls, and in that box I can take a hundred pictures without reloading the instrument. The way it is done, I, when I want to produce a new surface, simply wind the old one off with this winding machine. There is an opening at the front of the camera. Press just below this, so, and you have the picture. Now just wind the film off and you are ready for the next picture. Now pull it again, and this is so easy that some manufacturers say: "You simply push the button and we do the rest for you." That is nonsense, they don't do the "rest" for you. A friend of mine took one of these to Europe, and with it a dozen rolls of film, all of which he used. When he returned he sent them to the manufacturers and I think he got about twelve pictures back. Not every time you press the button is a good picture produced. You have to know a little bit about the science and use a little judgment.

Such is the state of photography to-day that this material can be spread upon any kind of transparent surface. In the case of plate, they are put in holders like this, generally only two on each side, and slipped into this frame in a dark room, in which no light can be used except one emitted through a deep red chimney. Then, the material that is used for developing these pictures is somewhat different from the old method. We use organic compounds, alkaline solutions, and organic matters capable of taking up oxygen. These organic materials, in conjunction with some alkali, are capable of taking up oxygen. They produce a disoxygenizing action. After dipping, that gives you the negative.

The prints are made in a variety of ways. The facility with which these apparati can be used has led to an enormous variety. You can have an apparatus something like that, or something like this, which is smaller.

In the United States there are to-day probably about ten thousand professional photographers and thirty or forty thousand amateurs, who usually do nothing but spoil plates. To give you an idea of some of the work done, not altogether by professionals, I have picked out from the number of pictures I have a few samples of the work. Here is a picture of a cattle ranch in Colorado. I have one a little larger of a horse race, but this is about as large as they can be made. That will give you an idea of the instantaneous effect. The distance between the foot and the top of the mountains is about twelve miles, so that you can get an idea of the capacity of the camera, of the sensitiveness of these compounds. Here is a Mexican picture which shows the great beauties of the Mexican flora--the cacti. Here is a study "King Lear" made by Buffler, the photographer. That is about as large as you can get. It is a pretty large plate to handle. Then there is another study "The Five O'clock Tea" some ladies at tea, by the same man as "King Lear." Here is another study, "A Game of Sixty six." Those are all silver prints, made with chloride of silver, using glass negatives and producing the positives by having the chloride of silver in albumen. The best vehicle to-day for making positive prints is albumen with chloride of silver.

It is found that if you take a mixture of gelatine and bichromate of potassium, and put into the mixture some pigment and expose it under a negative where the light acts, the gelatine is made insoluble and holds the pigment, and where the light does not act the gelatine is still soluble and can be washed away. Here is such a picture and it is very interesting--"In Camp." The shadows in that picture are on the white paper underneath.

Here are a couple of pictures of silver, two Bavarian pictures. This one, of a little girl, is by Einlander of Cologne, instantaneously taken without a head-rest, which is a very difficult piece of work. This is the same idea, instantaneously taken. Here are two pictures very interesting, which were in the exhibition at Chicago. They are pictures in platinum, showing that we are not confined to simply silver salts. We have here in this last picture one of the chlorides of platinum, the platine chloride. It cannot be spoiled in any way. The picture is good as long as the paper is good.

Here is an example of a yacht picture. It is the English yacht Iris. It is a fine picture. The yacht is travelling very fast.

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