Through A Glass Darkly
How glass plate technology met high Tech
By Mark R. MooreHistory in Danville is more than smelly, mildewed books full of dates and records of live birth and dead moldering bones. Most people in the United States live in sleek, shiny, modern connected metropolises where the pejorative phrase “What have you done for me lately?” symbolizes both the immediate lack of caring and superficial connections as opposed to what we have here in Danville. It’s what I would call “wearable history” here. Your best friend might be related to the street you live on (was be a Brainerd, it might be Greenbank Hollow, the residence you live in might have been known for a hundred years as Dr. Smith’s House or, possibly, the Pettengill farm. The hill you can see might be Roy Mountain and you find there’s an eighteen year old Roy on Facebook. Strangest of all, that person, by and large, can, if asked, quickly trace their lineage directly back to why that house, hill or road was named for a person in their family, not because the fact was drilled into them at school, but because they have a reticent Northeast Kingdom nobless oblige (broadly defined-deferring to a person because of their family’s past history past)and simply grew up with a story in their past and is left for you, the present, to discover how the past appellation became attached to the house or hollow. Recently, I was presented with a group of different sized, dark, apparently smoky glass photographic negatives that had been in encased a shoebox in a cellar for nearly hundred years before they saw the light of day and asked to discover what relation, if any they have to Danville.
The box of glass negatives was brought to me by Historical Harriet. Harriet is always going through our store of artifacts and likes to surprise me with her latest discovery and see what I will do with it. Before wanting to delve into the box and see how Historical Harriet would adapt available modern technology to solve to solve the problem of getting a picture from an old, dark chemically coated negative I did some research on the history of glass plates. Shortly after Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered the daguerreotype in 1839 which were printed on silver-plated copper or brass. Frederick Scott Archer, an English sculptor, expanded their discoveries the discoveries of Daguerre and Talbot and came out with the wet glass plate know as the wet collodion negative. Because it was coated glass and not paper the wet glass negatives created a sharper, more detailed negative and could produce more than one print from a negative but this had to be done within five minutes.