The man who gave us “photographs” Premium

On September 9, 1839, English polymath John Herschel took a glass photograph of a 40-foot reflecting telescope. This photograph, which incidentally is a word coined by him, is considered as the earliest remaining photograph on glass plate. A.S.Ganesh gives a snapshot (another word that Herschel first used in the context of photography) of Herschel’s life and his many contributions to science…

Did you know that the word “photograph,” arrived at by combining the Greek words phos, which means “light,” and graphe, which means “drawing, writing,” was coined in 1839 by English polymath Sir John Herschel? He used it as a noun and as a verb, along with the related words photography and photographic. The verb form, along with the related versions, were first employed by him in a paper he read before the Royal Society on March 14, 1839. 

The only child of Sir William Herschel, a celebrated astronomer, John was born in 1792 and was briefly educated at Eton and then privately, before heading to the University of Cambridge in 1809. It was here that he found the company of Charles Babbage, mathematician and originator of the concept of digital programmable computer, and George Peacock, also a mathematician. 

Together, the trio founded the Analytical Society of Cambridge in 1812 in order to bring the continental methods of mathematical calculus into practice in England. They were able to replace Isaac Newton’s difficult symbolism with that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German mathematician. 

After earning a place in the Royal Society on submitting his first mathematical paper in 1812, Herschel began to study for the bar in 1814, only to discontinue it the following year as he wasn’t happy with it. By 1816, he had begun his apprenticeship with his father in astronomical research, and benefited immensely from his father’s knowledge – knowledge that could only be acquired through decades of experience. 

Being among the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820, Herschel’s first major undertaking in astronomy was the re-observations of double stars catalogued by his father. Working alongside John Smith, a collaborator, he compiled a catalogue between 1821-23 and published it in the Philosophical Translations in 1824. This work won them the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 1825 the Lalande Prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences. 

With a sense of obligation to complete his father’s work, Herschel began planning for an expedition to the southern hemisphere in 1832 in order to survey the skies that were not seen in England. Four years of rigorous scientific activity in South Africa meant that by the time he returned in 1838, he had recorded the locations of thousands of stars and had detailed descriptions of a couple of galaxies best viewed from the southern hemisphere. As if that weren’t enough, he also observed the Halley’s Comet in 1835 and observed the satellites of Saturn. 

An established chemist, Herschel discovered the solvent power of hyposulphite of soda on otherwise insoluble salts of silver in 1819. This enabled him to become a key partner to photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot in his development of photography. When Talbot struggled with stabilising his photographic images, Herschel realised that the need of the hour was sodium thiosulphate, or hyposulphite of soda, as the fixing agent.