Practice question · True or false
John Herschel identified hyposulphite of soda as a fixer and gave photography the terms negative and positive.
Hints
- He was an astronomer and chemist rather than a photographer.
- The fixer discovery predates photography itself by twenty years.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the 1819 date is the striking part: the solution to the fixing problem existed for twenty years before there was an image worth fixing. Herschel supplied the chemistry to Talbot in 1839 and the vocabulary to everybody, which is a large contribution from someone who made few photographs.
Practise The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
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More questions on The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
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