William de Wiveleslie Abney

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Captain W. de W. Abney, CB, RE, FRS

Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney (born July 24, 1843 in Derby , † December 3, 1920 in Folkestone ) was a British chemist and photographer.

Live and act

Abney was born the son of a clergyman. After attending the Royal Military Academy, he served with the Royal Engineers in India. Back in England in 1869 he worked as a chemistry teacher at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham. In this position he had a lot of time for his chemical experiments. Here he started taking photos. His 1871 book, Instructions in Photography, became a standard work.

In 1874 he went on an expedition to Egypt. Together with Warren de la Rue , who built the telescope device, he made astronomical recordings of the transit of Venus. Abney contributed the emulsion and developer fluid. They had made over 2000 beautiful - but useless - pictures and had one more experience. Abney was able to convince his supervisor to do a "survey" of Egypt, so that he made many recordings there, which he then published in 1876 in his book "Thebes and Its Five Greater Temples".

He left Chatham in 1877 and became a civil employee of the Science and Art Department. He quickly became one of the main characters in British photography.

Abney worked on the chemical fundamentals of photography, especially color photography . He also made contributions to multicolor printing , to color theory (Abney's law: the luminance of a color obtained by additive color mixing is equal to the sum of the luminance of the individual mixed components) and to color vision as well as astrophotography and astrophotometry .

The Abney effect , named after him, describes the color change that only appears in the human eye when white is added. Other perceptual psychological phenomena are named after him and Wilhelm von Bezold as the Bezold-Abney phenomenon .

1878-79 he developed emulsions for instant and infrared photography . He invented oil transfer in 1873 , and in 1880 discovered the suitability of hydroquinone as a photographic developer substance . Now it was possible to produce suitable photo paper for prints.

In 1870 he joined the Photographic Society (later known as the Photographic Society of Great Britain, to this day as the Royal Photographic Society), which in 1878 was the first to award him its Progress Medal . In 1876 he was elected a " Fellow " of the Royal Society , which in 1882 awarded him the Rumford Medal . He was President of the Society from 1892–1894, 1896 and 1903–1905. He was also President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1893 to 1895 and President of the Physical Society of London from 1895 to 1897 . Since 1885 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

In 1890 he was knighted for his services .

On his initiative a photographic collection was set up in the South Kensington Museum, which later became the collection of the Science Museum and formed the basis for the "National Museum of Photography" in Bradford.

Publications

  • Chemistry for Engineers. 1870.
  • Instructions in Photography. 1871.
  • Thebes and Its Five Greater Temples . Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London 1876.
  • W. de W. Abney, ER Festing: Intensity of Radiation through Turbid Media. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Volume 40, 1886, pp. 378-380. (Published by the Royal Society )
  • W. de W. Abney, ER Festing: Color Photometry. Part III . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Volume 50, 1891-1892, pp. 369-372.

literature

  • W. Jerome Harrison: A History of Photography: Written as a Practical Guide and an Introduction to its Latest Developments . Trubner & Co, London 1888.
  • Klaus Hentschel : Mapping the Spectrum. Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching, Oxford: OUP 2002. online preview; searchable for Abney
  • Ken Jacobson: Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography 1839-1925. Quaritch, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-9550852-5-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Swansea Museum Online ( Memento from September 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. ↑ from: RE Abney: Paper IX. The Recent Transit of Venus. In: Papers on Subjects connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers. New Series XXIII, 1876, p. 73.
  3. ^ Royal Photographic Society: Progress medal. Official website with all award winners since 1878.
  4. ↑ shaper RSE Fellows 1783-2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 3, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Abney, William de Wiveleslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Abney, William (full name); Abney, Sir William de Wiveleslie (full name after 1890)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1843
PLACE OF BIRTH Derby
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1920
Place of death Folkestone