Norbert Pfretzschner senior
Norbert Pfretzschner (born January 11, 1817 in Jenbach , Tyrol , † June 21, 1905 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian doctor and politician. In photography he invented the dry gelatin process .
Life
Pfretzschner was born on the estate of his parents as the second child of Johann Baptist Pfretzschner, formerly Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, then royal Bavarian engineer-officer, and his wife, Johanna Countess Trauttmansdorff . The youth was marked by difficult circumstances for his parents, as the Tyroleans at that time were not very fond of a Bavarian officer as a former ally of Napoleon Bonaparte .
After Pfretzschner decided to become a doctor, he studied medicine in Prague and Vienna. In 1842 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD. During this troubled time he took a clear political stance and was a member of the Security Committee in Tyrol in 1848. As such, he was put on the proscription list and had to flee. When he returned home, he was appointed Imperial Defense Commissioner for the Lower Inn Valley. He was a member of the Reichstag from Kremsier and dwelt 1848 the National Assembly in Frankfurt at. In later years he was a liberal member of the Reichsrat (Austria) and the Tyrolean state parliament . He bravely committed himself to the equality decreed by the emperor, which the majority in the state parliament initially refused to recognize. This earned him the displeasure of large parts of the Tyrolean population, who burned the straw dolls representing him.
In addition to his political activities, he was also interested in art and science. In the 1850s he was passionate about photography, probably also inspired by his brother-in-law, the famous Munich-based lithographer and photographer Franz Hanfstaengl (founder of the art publisher of the same name). He created splendid landscapes and portraits (by Adolf Pichler and Ludwig Steub , among others ), which were still made using the wet plate method. It was necessary to sensitize the plates immediately before use and to develop the exposed plates while they were still wet, which generally required a darkroom tent to be taken along when taking landscape photos.
In order to counter this problem, Pfretzschner made attempts for several years to produce dry plates, with his friend Heinrich Hlasiwetz , professor of chemistry in Innsbruck, helping him. An attempt was successful in 1866, and by the next year he was able to improve the plates to such an extent that first-class images could be made with them. In 1869 he sent such pictures to the Photographic Exhibition in Hamburg, including the associated drying plates, and was awarded a silver medal for this. These pictures and plates were then taken to the Photographisches Museum in Berlin, where they were labeled “First dry plates; Inventor Dr. Norbert Pfretzschner zu Jenbach in Tirol ”. There they were destroyed in the Second World War. Otherwise, Pfretzschner did not exploit his invention. However, the fact that he is considered by some to be the inventor of the gelatine drying plate before the Englishman RL Maddox needs to be corrected: Pfretzschner had not experimented with the gelatine process , but with the tannin process , and he may have succeeded in improving it.
"Dr. Schippang recounts ... He mentions Dr. Fretschner in Tyrol. The same works with tannin, dousing the plates with rubber solution before collodioning and developing alkaline by first dousing a strong soda solution, then creating the image with 10 to 20 drops of pyrogallus. "
Pfretzschner was the father of the sculptor and hunting writer Norbert Pfretzschner .
literature
- A. Durstmüller: Pfretzschner Norbert. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 8, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1983, ISBN 3-7001-0187-2 , p. 41.
- Helmut Heß: The art publisher Franz Hanfstaengl and the early photographic reproduction. Akademischer Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-932965-35-3 .
- Heinz Gebhardt: Franz Hanfstaengl / From lithography to photography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1984.
- Erika Kustatscher: Norbert Pfretzschner (1817–1905): New sources on a key figure of liberalism in Tyrol. In: Tyrolean homeland . 2012, ISBN 978-3-7030-0806-1 , pp. 278-366.
Web links
- Norbert Pfretschner on Photo History
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dissertation: Chemical analysis of inorganic bodies .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pfretzschner, Norbert senior |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Pfretzschner, Norbert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian inventor of a drying plate and politician, member of the state parliament |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 11, 1817 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Jenbach , Tyrol |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 21, 1905 |
| Place of death | innsbruck |