10.0

//Source(s): 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 gap remains -- how did the Confederate spies in Canada learn to create and conceal microformed documents in the clothing of hired British agents? == bruces)))
 * Dead medium: >Dancer's novelty microphotographs; Dagron's balloon post**
 * From: bruces@well.com (Bruce Sterling)**