Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (59 page)

There are 3 x 10 to the 33rd power (3,000 quintillion) individual living things on this planet. (Of these, 75% are bacteria, and 0.000000,000,000,000,000,00013% are human beings.)

In 1851 English sculptor and photography buff Frederick Scott Archer used a substance called collodion to glue together some broken glass photographic plates. Made from guncotton (an explosive) dissolved in ether and alcohol, collodion formed a tough, waterproof skin when it dried; doctors used it to seal burns and wounds while new skin grew in underneath.

As Archer pieced together the broken glass, it occurred to him that collodion might be as good as egg whites for getting photosensitive chemicals to stick. He used it to apply a photosensitive emulsion to some photographic plates…and it worked. Not only that, but the plates had exposure times that were 20 times shorter than daguerreotypes (two minutes) or calotypes (one and a half minutes). With good lighting, an exposure of just a few seconds would result in a good picture.

The only drawback to the collodion process was that the photographic plates only worked while the collodion was still wet, because once it dried into its tough waterproof skin it was impervious to the developing chemicals. Photographers had to prepare their plates before they took photographs, and develop them immediately afterward. There was no time to waste.

That meant that a photographer had to bring all necessary equipment—chemicals, darkroom, and everything else—along for every picture. This, of course, was a huge hassle, but the “wet-plate process,” as it came to be known, produced such beautiful photographs that it quickly passed the daguerreotype and the albumen calotype to become the most popular form of photography. It remained so for more than 30 years.

Now there was only one thing left that kept people from having their pictures taken: the price.

As he worked on his wet collodion process, Archer noticed that when he held one of his negatives against a black piece of paper, it didn’t look like a negative—it looked like an ordinary photograph, very similar to a daguerreotype.

Archer made note of his observation, but didn’t do much with it. But other photographers did—they grabbed the idea as a way to make portraits cheaper. Why go to the trouble and expense of making a positive print, when a negative backed with black paper or some other dark material—soon to become known as an “ambrotype”—worked just as well?

In 1854 Boston photographer James Cutting patented an improved method of making ambrotypes and began selling them. Other photographers followed suit, and in the price war that followed, pressure from ambrotype photographers drove the price of a single daguerreotype from $5 down to 50 cents. Ambrotypes sold for as little as a dime, and though they were lower in quality they were much easier and quicker to produce: a person could pose for an ambrotype and receive the finished portrait in less than 10 minutes. Higher-quality daguerreotypes quickly began to lose ground to the speed and affordability of the ambrotype.

If viewing a glass negative against a black background gave it the appearance of a photograph, why not just make the negative out of something black to begin with, like a thin sheet of tinned iron painted with black varnish? You’d get the same effect for less money because you would be leaving out the glass, which was expensive.

That’s what Hamilton Smith was thinking when he invented what became known as the “tintype process” in 1856. Tintypes were cheap—they sold for a fraction of the cost of an ambrotype—and because they were made of iron they could take a lot of abuse. You could carry them in your pocket, send them through the mail, and collect them in photo albums. The images were still reversed, but with simple portraits no one seemed to mind.

As it turned out, you could even carry tintypes into war: In four years’ time, Union and Confederate soldiers would bring tintypes of their loved ones with them into battle; between skirmishes they would line up outside the photographer’s tent to pose for pictures of themselves to send back home.

As popular as they were, tintypes never came close to matching the craze of another type of photograph, the
carte-de-visite.
Invented by French photographer Andre Disdéri in 1854, the
carte-de-vis-ite
was, like the ambrotype and the tintype, an extension of the collodion process. Disdéri’s idea was to use a special camera with four lenses to divide a single large photograph into many smaller photographs. Some
carte-de-visite
cameras only let the subject pose for one photograph, which was then duplicated eight or more times; others allowed several poses. Either way the effect was the same: for the price of a single photograph, the customer got as many as 24.

Never met one: one out of every 10 people surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs.

Disdéri intended that the tiny pictures, which were printed on paper and backed by stiff cardboard, would serve as photo versions of traditional calling cards to be given as a memento of a visit with friends.

Then in 1860, Queen Victoria, her husband Prince Albert, and their children posed for some
cartes-de-visite.
These images were the first photographs of the royal family ever commissioned for the public. They were sold individually, in sets, and in a book called the
Royal Album.
And they were hugely popular.

Photo studios took note. They started printing photographs of other famous people—Sarah Bernhardt, Abraham Lincoln, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant among them—to see if they would sell. They did, prompting what came to be known as “cardomania.”
Cartes-de-visite
covered a huge variety of subjects, including animals, politicians, military leaders, famous works of art, scenes of faraway places…even Barnum’s circus freaks. Collectors bought them all. During the Civil War, people bought pictures of Maj. Robert Anderson, the hero of the battle of Fort Sumter, at a rate of 1,000 prints a day.

Cardomania was so powerful that it may be the reason the White House still stands in Washington D.C. The Founding Fathers never intended the White House to be a permanent presidential residence; it was just supposed to serve until something bigger and better would be built.

Few Americans had ever seen the White House, until Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, when photos of the fallen president—as well as of the house where he had lived—circulated in great numbers.
These popular images established the White House as a symbol of the presidency…and of the United States. After that, no one would have suggested tearing it down.

Bird brain: Researchers have been able to teach ravens to count as high as six.

After decades of development and innovation, photographs had become part of pop culture. They sold for only pennies apiece. People wore them as jewelry in brooches, lockets and pocket watches. They projected them onto the walls of their homes using gas-lit “photographic lanterns,” and drank from china cups decorated with photographic images fired into the porcelain. They bought picture postcards of the places they visited and mailed them home to friends.

Huge albums overflowing with photographs were as common a fixture in late-19th-century households as televisions are today. So were stereographs, double pictures about the size of postcards that, when viewed through a special viewer (like a View-Master), formed a single 3-D image. Portraits were still popular, too, especially now that photographers could retouch negatives to remove wrinkles, moles and other blemishes.

Journalists incorporated photographs into news coverage, publishers pasted them into books, cartographers used them to improve maps, and Scotland Yard fought crime by photographing criminals for the first time. Photographs were everywhere.

These pictures all had one thing in common: They were taken by professionals, or by serious amateurs. If you wanted to be a photographer in the 1860s, you had to be a chemist, too. And you had to have a fair amount of money. This began to change in 1871, when a British physician named Richard Leach Maddox decided he’d had enough of the wet-plate process and started looking for something better.

Part VI of the photography story is on
page 400
.

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

—
Ansel Adams

Larger than life: Frank Lloyd Wright wore elevator shoes.

Sometimes the answer is irrelevant—it’s the question that counts, been sent in by BRI readers.

Do hungry crows have ravenous appetites?

If a lawyer can be disbarred and clergymen defrocked, can electricians be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, and tree surgeons disembarked?

When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?

Why is
brassiere
singular and
panties
plural?

Why are builders afraid to have a 13th floor, but book publishers aren’t afraid to have a
chapter 11
?

If a word is misspelled in a dictionary, how would we ever know?

Why is it that writers write but grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

Why do “slow down” and “slow up” mean the same thing?

Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is?

Why do
fat chance
and
slim chance
mean the same thing?

If humans evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes?

How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another?

Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

Why don’t you ever see the headline “Psychic Wins Lottery”?

Why is it called
lipstick
if you can still move your lips?

When you lose your temper, shouldn’t that mean that you get happy?

If someone is deceased, did they just come back from the dead?

How do you get off a non-stop flight?

If blind people wear dark glasses, why don’t deaf people wear earmuffs?

Stand-up act: Lewis Carroll wrote
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
standing up.

Ever heard of Prince Philip? He’s the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II of England. About the only time he makes headlines is when he, as one newspaper puts it, “uses his royal status to insult and belittle people.” His public gaffes are so frequent that they’ve earned him the title “The Duke of Hazard.”

To a driving instructor in Scotland:
“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”

To a Nigerian diplomat in traditional Nigerian garb:
“You look as if you’re ready for bed.”

On seeing a fuse box filled with wires, during a visit to an electronics company:
“This looks like it was put in by an Indian.”

To a chubby 13-year-old boy at a space exploration exhibit, pointing to a space capsule:
“You’ll have to lose weight if you want to go in that.”

To a smoke-detector activist who lost two of her children in a house fire:
“My smoke alarm is a damn nuisance. Every time I run my bath, the steam sets it off and I’ve got firefighters at my door.”

To members of the British Deaf Association, while pointing to a loudspeaker playing Caribbean music:
“No wonder you are deaf.”

To a tourist, during a state visit to Hungary:
“You can’t have been here long, you’ve no potbelly.”

Speaking to British students studying in China:
“If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”

On the “key problem” facing Brazil:
“Brazilians live there.”

On his daughter Princess Anne:
“If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.”

On seeing a picture once owned by England’s King Charles
I
in the Louvre in Paris:
“So I said to the Queen, ‘Shall we take it back?’ ”