Herschel's Cyanotype: Invention or discovery?

Abstract

Whether it is more apt to describe cyanotype as invented — or discovered — by Sir John Herschel in 1842 is a question the reader may decide by the end of this essay. Whatever the verdict, it is well known that this process of photographic contact-printing in Prussian blue was brought to light just three years after Louis Daguerre and Henry Talbot had announced their independent inventions of photography in silver, using metal and paper substrates, respectively. Their successes in finally securing images of silver represent separate fruitions of an idea that had been gestating for more than a century in the minds and laboratories of several noted natural philosophers.1 In contrast to this well-known history, the birth of cyanotype was totally unexpected, coming both literally and metaphorically ‘out of the blue’, to a single parent. The question that this essay will address — at least, by implication — is: why should the circumstances. of these two photographic innovations have been so different?

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