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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 10.0
Dead media: Dancer's novelty microphotographs; Dagron's balloon post
From: bruces_AT_well.com (Bruce Sterling)
Source: Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention
edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Faber and
Faber 1996 ISBN 0-571-17242-3
from an essay titled "Sliding Scales: Microphotography
and the Victorian Obsession with the Minuscule," by Marina
Benjamin (pages 99-122)
"John Benjamin Dancer is not a name to be reckoned with in the annals of
science. Reading the various biographical notices written since his death in 1887,
one is struck with a certain sense of pathos; not even the liberal sprinkling
of well-meaning hyperbole endemic to biographical memoirs of scientific societies
can disguise the salvage exercise. Here was a man who almost discovered ozone,
failed to patent a number of ingenious optical and mechanical devices that might
have made him a fortune, improved other people's discoveries rather than made
his own, an optician who lost his sight and died courting penury. In short, a
man whose career was a catalogue of near misses, bad management and consequential
blunders. (...)
"Dancer dabbled in the possibility of combining
microscopy with photography from the start. During a
lecture at the Mechanics Institute in Liverpool, before an
audience of 1,500 people, he made a Daguerreotype image of
a flea magnified to six inches in length. (....) It was
only with Scott Archer's development of the wet collodion
process in 1851 that he (((Dancer))) was able to produce
successful microphotographs, which by virtue of being
reproducible became commercially viable.
"Mounted on standard 3 X 1 glass slides, microphotographs look deceptively
like histological preparations, that is, ultra-thin slivers of living tissue,
but when magnified 100 times, the inscrutable tiny black dot glued in place is
revealed to be an exquisite, fine-grained reproduction of Raphael's Madonna or
the ruins of Tintern Abbey, not a delicate tranche of liver or a cluster of blood
platelets. (...)
"Their subjects ranged from portraits of the
great and good == eminent scientists, European royals,
political and military dignitaries, literati and
thespians; celebrated paintings; religious texts, like
the Lord's Prayer or the Sermon on the Mount; extracts
from Tennyson, Dickens, Milton, Byron and Pope; to views
from around the world (forerunners of the tourist
snapshot). (((Yes, you read this correctly == John
Benjamin Dancer made and sold text "content" to be
accessed through a home microscope.)))
"Dancer produced his first commercial slide in 1853
== a rather austere picture of electrician William
Sturgeon's memorial tablet. By 1873 he was advertising
nearly 300 microphotographs and by the end of his career
the grand total had risen to over 500. Precisely how he
manufactured his microscopic marvels remains a trade
secret, since he never ventured into print on the subject.
It is known that in experimental trials he used the eyes
of recently killed oxen as photographic lenses and that he
began the process with 4 X 5 inch collodion glass-plate
negatives, but beyond that it can only be assumed that his
method of reduction bore some similarity to that
publicized by George Shadbolt in 1857. At the time
Shadbolt was President of the Microscopical Society and
editor of the *Photographic Journal,* in whose pages a
priority dispute over the invention of microphotography
took place, Dancer winning the day.
"Almost as soon as Dancer perfected the mechanics
of reproduction, he began selling microphotographs as
novelty items. At a shilling a slide, and with decent
parlour microscopes to be had for a few pounds,
microphotographic entertainment was an economic method of
rational recreation. (...) In fact the market for
microphotographs was sufficiently sizeable to make it
profitable for Dancer to sell his slides to a number of
retailers of scientific instruments. (...)
"Sir David Brewster, who in the 1850s was Professor of Physics at St Andrews,
saw streams of possibilities emanating from Dancer's invention. In an article
on the micrometer for the eighth edition of the *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* he
waxed futuristic on Dancer's technique: 'Microscopic copies of dispatches and
valuable papers and plans might be transmitted by post, and secrets might be placed
in spaces not larger than a full stop or a small blot of ink.' While his latter
reverie was to remain confined to the pages of spy novels, the former was genuinely
prophetic: Brewster took examples of Dancer's work on his Continental tour in
1857 where they were seen by French photographer Prudent Dagron, who in
1870 used the method to relay messages by carrier pigeon between besieged Paris
and Tours."
(((Microphotography -- from experimental 19th century optical science, to parlour
toy medium, to mass communication media for France under siege. Dancer the half-baked
entrepreneur, to Brewster the teacher and pop science writer, to Dagron the entrepreneur
and spy. It's a very satisfying story, but a large lacuna remains -- how did the
Confederate spies in Canada learn to create and conceal microformed documents
in the clothing of hired British agents? == bruces)))
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