Thomas Wedgwood

Thomas Wedgwood

Thomas Wedgwood (born May 14, 1771 in Etruria Hall , Stoke-on-Trent , Staffordshire , † July 10, 1805 in Eastbury House , Dorset ) was a British pioneer of photographic technology .

Life

Thomas Wedgwood was born the son of the potter Josiah Wedgwood ; between 1786 and 1788 he studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, but dropped out of the course due to illness. In 1796 he stayed in Germany , in 1800 in the West Indies . He died at the age of 34 on his Eastbury House estate in Dorset.

plant

Thomas Wedgwood dealt with chemistry and physics after his studies ; Among them are studies on the relationship between heat and light , which he published for the first time in 1792 under the title Experiments and Observations on the Creation of Light in Various Materials through Heat and Friction .

In 1799 Wedgwood got contact copies of leaves on glass coated with silver chloride , which were reversed and which he could not fix. He reported on his research in 1802 in the Journal of the Royal Institution under the title Report on a method of copying glass pictures and producing silhouettes by the action of light on silver nitrate. Invented by T [homas] Wedgwood, with observations by H [umphry] Davy .

Fonts

• Experiments and observations on the production of light from different bodies, by heat and by attrition. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . Vol. 82 (1792), pp. 28-47, 270-82.
• mit Humphry Davy: An account of a method of copying paintings upon glass and making profiles by the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq., with observations by H. Davy. In: Journal of the Royal Institution. Volume 1, No. 9, London, June 22, 1802, pp. 170-174. Printed in: Beaumont Newhall (Ed.): Photography: Essays & Images. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1980, ISBN 0-87070-387-0 , p. 15 f.

literature

• Klaus Beneke: Thomas Wedgwood and John Frederick William Herschel and on the history of photography, especially the fixation of images from 1800 to 1850. In: Biographies and scientific résumés of colloid scientists, whose life dates are related to 1996. Contributions to the history of colloid sciences, VII. Knof, Nehmten 1999, ISBN 3-934413-01-3 ( online , PDF file; 2.1 MB)
• Geoffrey Batchen: Wedgwood, Thomas. In: John Hannavy: Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Taylor & Francis, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-415-97235-2 , Vol. 2, pp. 1482 f.
• Trevor H. Levere: Wedgwood, Thomas (1771-1805). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, 2004, doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 28967 .