Talk:Thomas Wedgwood (photographer)

Photographic experiments

A piece of mind-bogglingly unencyclopedic anecdotal "evidence" from fiction, contributed on the assumption that to have one's portrait "taken" has always meant the use of photography, started me hitting the edit tab on this article. Unsupported opinions, unwarranted implications and outright errors concerning Wedgwood's photographic work kept me at it until the limits of my existing knowledge drew dangerously near.

A syndrome evident in other articles had evidently wrought havoc here: a real or supposed new discovery (in this case, 2008 news of an alleged surviving photogram by Wedgwood) in some arcane technical or historical field goes viral in the online press and blogosphere, then WP editors with little or no expertise in that field hasten to expand one or more WP articles with nth generation "facts" and misinformation gleaned from those sources. Even the BBC and the New York Times have very poor track records for accuracy when reporting exotic news of this kind: they have no resident expert. Their reporter's "background" may consist of doing some hasty googling and reading the Wikipedia article. As often as not, yet another layer of innocent misreporting is added by the WP editor.

Consulting several hardcover and a few high-quality web sources at length, I find that the only primary source for any details about Wedgwood's experiments is Davy's brief 1802 account. If any alleged feature is not to be found there, then it is simply an assumption, speculation or error by a later writer, sometimes fossilized into a widely accepted "fact" by generations of repetition. Davy's paper itself is something of a minefield, as it requires attention to distinguish what Wedgwood did from presumably later variations and elaborations by Davy himself ("In following these processes, I have found..."), such as making enlarged shadow images by means of a solar microscope.

Davy's paper is available unabridged in Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer by R. B. Litchfield, London, 1903, several different scans of which are available in several formats at archive.org. That book, despite its great age, appears to remain the definitive text on the subject. As far as I can determine, no new information of any importance has come to light in the 110 years since it was published. If anyone has definite, impeccably sourced information to the contrary, a heads-up would be very much appreciated.

Having waded in this deep and being now more thoroughly acquainted with what is and is not actually known, I intend to do more housecleaning and improvement, including a badly-needed reorganization of the whole photography-related section, by sporadic editing as time permits. Any objections, suggestions or general comments? AVarchaeologist (talk) 04:12, 12 May 2013 (UTC)