1842.               Amateur photographer made calotype in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1]

From Harvard Magazine (Cambridge, Massachusetts) January-February 1981, Vol. 83, No. 3, p. 41.  At That Moment In Time.  Harvard’s photo archives, explored by Christopher S. Johnson, Fourteen in a series.

Josiah Parsons Cooke (1827-1894) Took these Calotype photographs of the Boston Museum on Tremont Street and part of city hall (or was it the old courthouse?) around 1842.

In 1842, Cooke was just fifteen.  No matter.  Photography itself was only three.  Daguerre’s silver-plate process (the daguerreotype) and William Fox Talbot’s paper-negative process (the calotype or talbotype) had been made public in 1839.  The daguerreotype, because of its subtle gradations of tone, its microscopic grain, and its awesomely high definition, became the popular favorite.  The calotype, in which a harsh granite like image emerged from a haze of paper weave, mottling, blotches, and even watermarks, would not be fully appreciated until Impressionism had accustomed critics to form that dissolved in a mist of texture.  By then both calotype and daguerreotype had long been obsolete.

The calotype was patented in England and the United States; the daguerreotype was patented only in England.  Calotype licenses came dear, and for the Americans the daguerreotype was free.  Commercial common sense made the American calotype a rarity.

Still, a calotype was more easily made than a daguerreotype.  Writing paper dipped in solutions of table salt and silver nitrate was less expensive (and less deadly) than a silver plate fumed with vapors of iodine and mercury.  A few American amateurs—well beneath the notice of the patentee—tried their hand at calotype.

The earliest were Samuel Longfellow (younger brother of the poet) and Edward Everett Hale (author of “The Man without a Country”), who,  in the spring of 1839—their senior year at Harvard—succeeded in calotyping Harvard Hall from the window of Hale’s room in Massachusetts Hall.  Hale was seventeen at the time.  In February of 1840, M. Carey Lea, then seventeen years old, exhibited forty of his calotypes to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.  In 1842, the Boston inventor William F. Channing, at a relatively mature 22, published an account of his own simplified version of the calotype process.

Though last, Josiah Cooke, at fifteen, was the youngest of these young experimenters; and of them all, his images alone survive.  Photo historian Robert Taft, in Photography and the American Scene, concludes that “they are among the earliest American negatives still in existence.

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[1] A Directory Of Massachusetts Photographers 1839-1900.