The sharpness and tonal range of the daguerreotype continues to be among the wonders of black and white photography. Anyone who has examined at close range one of the many small, velvet-framed black and white pictures exhibited in historical collections cannot help but marvel at their lifelike appearance, precisely detailed, delicately shaded and naturally luminous. The black and white image is literally a bas-relief created by the mercury. The amount of the mercury amalgamated with silver at each point in the black and white image varies directly with the amount of light that has struck that point on the plate and it is this very gradual build-up of amalgam that creates a seemingly infinite range of grays. The amalgam is mirror like in reflectivity, so that highlighted areas are unusually brilliant, while the deep, rich black of the dark sections are simply the polished silver plate which, when viewed from the proper angle, reflects almost no light.
The French government quickly recognized the value of the new process and just seven months after Daguerre's announcement to the Academy, he and Niepce's son, Isidore, were awarded lifetime pensions. Soon the daguerreotype became an adjunct to historical functions. "At the opening of the railroad to Courtrai, Belgium," the British Mining Journal reported in 1840, ". . . the camera obscura is to be placed on an eminence commanding the royal pavilion, the locomotive engine, the train of wagons, and the major part of the cortege, and is to be brought into action exactly at the time of the delivery of the inauguration speech. A discharge of cannon is to be the signal for a general immobility, which is to last the seven minutes necessary for obtaining a good representation of all the personages present."
There was, however, criticism of the new process. While praising it as an invention "little short of miraculous," a British publication, The Penny Cyclopedia, complained that the highly polished surface of the daguerreotype produced a "glare offensive to the eye." The journal also found fault with the curious tendency of the plates to appear as negatives unless viewed from exactly the right angle. This meant the black and white pictures could not be hung in frames, since "it would be necessary to take them down to look at them." But there were other, more important disadvantages that made the daguerreotype a technological dead end in spite of its superb quality. The plate required artful polishing, sensitizing and developing, and the black and white image was extremely delicate and required elaborate protection from abrasion. The most serious drawback of the process, however, was that each plate was unique; there was no way of producing multiple copies except by rephotographing the original.
Although the daguerreotype would continue to be made for about a decade, the process was actually obsolete when it was introduced. Black and white photography's time had come and in England a gentleman scientist had already invented the modern black and white photographic process. On January 25, 1839, less than three weeks after Daguerre's announcement to the French Academy, William Henry Fox Talbot appeared before the Royal Institution of Great Britain to present his negative-positive system. Talbot was a disappointed man when he gave his hastily prepared report. Daguerre's prior announcement, Talbot admitted later, "frustrated the hope with which I had pursued, during nearly five years, this long and complicated series of experiments-the hope, namely, of being the first to announce to the world the existence of the New Art-which has since been named Black and white photography." Although Talbot could not be the first, he was determined to establish, as soon as possible, that his process was wholly independent of Daguerre's.
Talbot was fairly typical of a number of amateur scientists who graced the gentry of the early 19th Century. Born in southern England in 1800 to an upper-class family-his mother was the daughter of an earl, his father an officer in the Dragoons-Talbot received a proper education at Harrow and Trinity College, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his contributions to mathematics and served briefly as a member of Parliament. He sometimes used a camera obscura to help him in sketching, one of his hobbies, and he recalled that in 1833 "the idea occurred to me-how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural black and white images to in black and white print themselves durably and remain fixed on paper." He soon began his experiments.