What Was One Technical Consequence Of Early Nineteenth-century Cameras?
Capturing "Jove's Autograph": Late Nineteenth-Century Lightning Photography and Electric Bureau
Fig. ane William North. Jennings, Lightning Photo, 1885. Glass lantern slide. The Franklin Constitute, Philadelphia.
On September v, 1885, Scientific American published a photograph depicting a "streak of real 'Jersey lightning,'" taken by William Nicholson Jennings (1860-1946) at 10:30 p.m. on the kickoff of Baronial that aforementioned twelvemonth.1 Captured on the roof of Jennings' firm in North Philadelphia and afterward reproduced as a lantern slide (fig. 1), the photograph reveals a flash of lightning traveling diagonally from the upper right corner of the frame to the horizon, illuminating the tops of copse and a line of row business firm roofs in the foreground. Regional and national newspapers soon proclaimed Jennings as the first to successfully photograph lightning with a camera. Later that month, Philadelphia'due south The Daily News reported that the "amateur lensman" was "in a fair mode to become famous, while the skillful professional who captures the lazy graces of the elephant and the anaconda and threatens to revolutionize our notions of creature life, may die before he gets a proficient sitting from a mule."two In this humorous chestnut, The Daily News compared Jennings' achievement with the tiresome progress of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who labored at his movement studies project in the urban center at the same time.
While Jennings has non fared every bit well every bit Muybridge in terms of name recognition today, he too was securely invested in capturing phenomena the human eye cannot accurately meet without mechanical assistance.3 Jennings acknowledged "that the movements of a horse's feet and legs in running and jumping were not understood by artists until the exact postures were defenseless by the camera, [but] no object has acquired more discussion on the question whether or not we tin can trust the evidence of our senses, than the flash of lightning."four Photographic engineering offered both Muybridge and Jennings a means to assert the administrative truthfulness of their images in guild to further knowledge of beast locomotion and meteorological events. Jennings' images and correspondence demonstrate that he was keenly enlightened of the role of photography in contemporary debates regarding engineering and the limits of human perception and objectivity in art.
Jennings' power to record lightning relied on invention; he only succeeded in photographing his subject in 1882 through the adaptation of specially designed "Rapid Eclipse Photograph-plates" supplied by his friend, occasional business partner, and dry plate manufacturer John Carbutt (1832-1905).five Jennings' lightning photographs were also thoroughly enmeshed in shifting public perceptions of another new invention: electric lighting. Jennings successfully obtained his first photograph in 1882, but a year after the Brush Electric Light Company installed arc street lamps along Anecdote Street in Philadelphia. While S. Hollis Clayson and Hélène Valance have finer explored how electricity and other new technologies transformed artistic visualizations of the nighttime during the belatedly nineteenth and early on twentieth century, this paper argues that lightning photographs produced by Jennings and others reinforced the material bureau of electricity at a moment when it was transformed from an unruly, violent force to go a useful power that could be pictorially harnessed, domesticated, utilized, and captured.6 In exploring the material bear upon and significance of lightning and electricity, I am inspired past recent work in new materialism, which, in the words of political theorist Jane Bennett, recognizes "the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—non only to impede or cake the will and designs of humans but as well to deed as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own."7 In her examination of the vast assemblage of human and nonhuman agents that precipitated a massive 2003 power blackout, Bennett describes electricity every bit a "stream of vital materialities called electrons . . . always on the move, e'er going somewhere, though where this will be is non entirely anticipated."viii The unpredictability of electricity—whether employed to illuminate city streets or hurtling through the stormy sky—played an important role in the production and reception of lightning photography and electric lights in the late nineteenth century.
Jennings was affiliated with a growing, international network of photographers and meteorological societies invested in the visual documentation of lightning. He and others attempted to utilize photography to challenge fine art representations of thunderbolts and place lightning types. Ultimately, visual categorization proved untenable and unreliable, owing to the powerful material bureau of lightning, which shaped and destroyed matter and lefts its own distinctive mark on photographic plates and even human skin. This disruptive strength, revealed and promoted in Jennings' photos and corresponding texts, informed public stance about electric lights—or "chained lightning"—illuminating the city. This study is function of an ongoing research projection investigating the relationship of lightning photography to shifting conceptions of infinite, time, objectivity, and electrical agency in the late nineteenth century.
Built-in in Yorkshire in 1860, Jennings immigrated to Philadelphia in 1879, after the Panic of 1876 bankrupted the family wool mill. He worked every bit a stenographer and typist at John Wanamaker's new section store, and began experimenting with photography in 1881 using a 4 x v inch glass-plate photographic camera. The Pennsylvania Railroad hired him equally a surveyor in 1885. For that position, he documented construction sites, bridges, and tunnels in order to verify progress and protect the company from litigious lawsuits. His lightning photographs were only one aspect of a successful career in commercial photography. Jennings recorded the changing landscape of Philadelphia through photographs of buildings and street scenes, and he partnered with Frederick Ives (1856-1937) in the development of the photochromoscope, producing brightly hued images of tourist sites such as Yellowstone and Niagara Falls. He likewise took the first aerial photographs of the city, ascending higher up Philadelphia with the balloonist Samuel King on July 4, 1893. He was an active member of the Franklin Institute, an institution securely invested in the promotion of emerging photographic and electrical technologies. Jennings deposited a scrapbook of his piece of work on photographing lightning there in 1937, and it is this album, boldly titled "Jove's Shorthand," that forms the foundation of this enquiry. The layered media of this binder includes newspaper clippings, articles, and correspondence demonstrating a desire to both preserve the unpredictability and agential capacity of lightning while systematically attempting to capture and document its multiple forms.9
Fig. two James Nasmyth, "On the Form of Lightning," in Report of the 20-6th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Scientific discipline, (London: James Murray, 1857), 14.
According to Jennings' ain personal narrative, he set out to photograph lightning in order to prove the inaccuracy of the "awkward angular zig-zag" populating artworks. In his scrapbook, he wrote, "To my centre [lightning] appeared with an infinite variety of outline; all of them graceful, none zig-zag."10 Although he insisted this idea was original, James Nasmyth (1808-1890), the Scottish engineer and astronomer, likely inspired Jennings in his quest. In 1857, Nasmyth published a study visually comparison two sketches taken from firsthand observation with the offending creative person'south conventional zigzag (fig. two), and insisting that he had never "observed such forms of lightning every bit that usually represented in works of fine art."11 To photographically bear witness this bespeak, Jennings claimed he hauled a photographic camera up to his roof during every storm for two years, simply that his emulsion was not sensitive enough to record the "evanescent wink," as he described it. On September 2, 1882, attributable to Carbutt'southward new photo plates, Jennings finally captured "a dazzling stream of electric calorie-free" (fig. 3).12 His photographs improved as he used more than sensitive emulsions and "quicker" lenses with a larger maximum aperture, leading to the clearer image reproduced in Scientific American a few years afterward.13
Fig. 3 William North. Jennings, First Photograph of Lightning, taken September 2, 1882, Philadelphia, 1882. Silver gelatin print. The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.
Despite his insistent declarations, Jennings was not actually the first to photograph lightning. The St. Louis photographer T. G. Easterly (1809-1882) is a more likely contender for this title, having stock-still the meteorological miracle in a daguerreotype several decades earlier in 1847 (fig. iv). Reproduced equally a cabinet carte by Cramer, Gross, and Company, the image was displayed beside portrait likenesses of "prominent citizens, Indian chiefs, and Notorious Robbers and Murderers," in Easterly's St. Louis gallery, thereby positioning lightning, and its miraculous photographic arrest, as an object of exotic wonder.xiv Several photographers, including Robert Haensel in Federal republic of germany, Charles Moussette in France, and New England meteorologist A. H. Binden successfully secured the elusive thunderbolt in the 1880s.15 Nonetheless, Jennings aggressively promoted and maintained throughout his life the designation for his 1882 photograph as the earliest on record.
Fig. 4 Cramer, Gross and Co., subsequently T. M. Easterly, Daguerreotype of a Streak of Lightning taken June 18th 1847 at 9 o'clock P.Chiliad. By T. M. Easterly St. Louis Mo., 1847. Chiffonier carte du jour photograph of daguerreotype. Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Jennings presented and disseminated his lightning images through different media and venues, positioning them as both popular entertainment and scientific specimens. He reproduced his photographs in the press, compiled them in scrapbooks, and offered curated lantern slide presentations in Philadelphia and New York. Jennings likewise produced stereoscopic views of lightning made with ii modest cameras placed about 1 hundred feet autonomously in lodge to "give more than violent perspective."xvi At one Franklin Found meeting, he circulated a number of these prints mounted in a manus stereoscope, providing members with a more immersive experience of his bailiwick.17 Jennings enhanced the seductive qualities of his photographs by inviting viewers to imagine the ferocity of the storm. His script for one lantern slide presentation prepare the scene with "the close of a hot sultry day, when you are returning habitation with limp collar and dropping spirits" and yous notice a "banking concern of dense curdling clouds" with "show of nifty internal strife."18
While Jennings' photographs entertained and captivated audiences, they were too aligned with a broader international interest in the photography and categorizing of meteorological phenomena in order to ameliorate empathize and predict their occurrence and chapters for destruction.19 In the American Periodical of Photography, meteorologist Alexander McAdie proposed that photography could assistance determine the dimensions and electric energy of a lightning flash, thereby potentially facilitating its control.20 National conditions services demonstrated detail investment in the collection and implementation of lightning and cloud studies. The United States Weather Bureau, officially established in 1890 under the Section of Agriculture, received many photographs of weather events, including images by Jennings, which they summarized in the Monthly Weather Review and displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.21 The British Royal Meteorological Lodge (RMS) used photographs and firsthand observation to authoritatively assert the atmospheric inaccuracies of fine art. Every bit photography historian Jennifer Tucker has demonstrated, the employment of photography by the RMS reveals the intimate entanglement of creative visual practice and ideologies with scientific imaging and its reception in the tardily nineteenth century.22 In an 1895 address to the RMS, the astronomer and meteorologist Richard Inwards condemned a number of "weather fallacies" promoted by artists. To illustrate his presentation, Inwards compared a projected prototype of artist'due south lightning with "a photograph taken straight from nature" in club to demonstrate that "the creative person had very little understood the true class of the lightning flash."23 Inwards upheld the photograph, "straight from nature," every bit the more accurate record.
Jennings similarly targeted artists in his ain entrada against inaccurate lightning representation. One unattributed newspaper clipping in his "Jove's Autograph" scrapbook features a condemnation of the scene painter for the theatrical sensation, The Soudan, which enjoyed a successful run at Philadelphia'southward Walnut Street Theater in 1891. Even though the scenery for the production was praised elsewhere for its beauty and "truthfulness to nature," the letter of the alphabet, nearly likely written by Jennings himself, chides, "One is never likewise old to learn, and in this instance the axiom applies to the scene painter who mapped out the tracks of the lightning on the heaven that backs the scene used in the second set." The author recommends that the painter consult "Mr. Jenning's scores of instantaneous photographs of thunderbolts in all conceivable poses" to right his unforgivable zigzag flash.24 However, this employment of photography by Jennings, the RMS, the U.South. Weather condition Bureau opened up new questions most electrical agency, photographic accuracy, and objectivity.
Fig. 5 William N. Jennings, Ribbon Lightning, August 1887. Silver gelatin print, image: 3 ix/sixteen 10 2 three/4 in.; mount: 6 x 3 1/two in. George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.
The RMS's effort to categorize the various colors, forms, and consequences of the electric flash provides an illuminating instance of the limits of institutional knowledge and potency when documenting such an elusive subject field. In 1888, the Quarterly Journal of the order published a sample of hundreds of weather communications solicited and received from amateur photographers and interested civilians in their "First Report of the Thunderstorm Committee." The RMS attempted to use these photographs to organize lightning into unlike categories, with descriptive titles like "stream," "sinuous," "ramified," "meandering," and "beaded."25 While the RMS never published his photographs, Jennings was well aware of the initiatives and publications of the society, which he pasted in his scrapbooks and cited in his correspondence. Similar the RMS, Jennings likewise labeled his lightning specimens "ribbon" (fig. five), "vertical," "branched," "beaded," "tree," and "stratified," among other terms. While both Jennings and the RMS sought to establish lightning types, the electric wink proved to exist a visual conundrum. Not just was lightning notoriously difficult to capture, just documentation varied according to the photographic skill and visual vigil of the witness. The RMS therefore institute it difficult to correlate and categorize the diverse information they received. By rejecting the formulaic, orderly zigzag favored by painters, Jennings and the RMS instead opened the door to an endless diverseness of lightning shapes, colors, and sizes. The RMS ultimately concluded that "from the evidence now obtained it is evident that lightning assumes various typical forms, under conditions which are at nowadays unknown."26 Photography did non provide the comparable, standardized data they had hoped for.
Fig. 6 William N. Jennings, Tree Struck by Lightning, West Chester, PA, northward.d. Glass plate negative. The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Powerful and unpredictable, lightning rejected like shooting fish in a barrel classification, as information technology proved capable of reproducing its ain paradigm and transforming matter, oft in dramatic and subversive means. Tardily nineteenth-century newspapers grow with stories of injuries, property impairment, and fatalities attributed to lightning. Co-ordinate to the Weather condition Bureau, from 1883 to 1892, lightning struck two,335 barns, 104 churches, and 664 dwellings, and killed approximately 200 people annually in the The states.27 Jennings' lightning photos visually conveyed this awesome ability as bright streaks that slash across the photographic plate, destabilizing the viewer'due south sense of perspective. In a photograph of "ribbon lightning" (encounter fig. v), for example, the outline of a tree or bush in the upper left corner provides the merely indicator of a surrounding landscape. Merely Jennings' scrawling handwriting underneath the image alerts the viewer to the correct orientation of the photo. In his scrapbook, Jennings noted that this particular discharge struck and fired a befouled ii miles away, reminding the viewer of the harmful potential of his bailiwick. Jennings was well enlightened of the damaging power of natural forces that persistently thwarted human intervention; he recorded the twisted, exploded forms of lightning-struck trees (fig. 6) and documented the devastating aftermath of the Johnstown Flood in 1889, caused by the failure of the South Fork Dam in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Beyond its dissentious powers and the visual show of its violence, lightning invited directly comparison to artists through its perceived ability to produce photographic effects, imprinting images of firsthand surroundings through a process termed keraunography.28 The nigh sensational report of this occurrence took place in Bath in 1812, when six sheep killed past lightning were sheared to reveal an imprint of the local landscape on their skin. In 1883, lightning struck a male child standing by a yew tree in Berwickshire, England, leaving an impression on his arm evocative of tree branches.29 When describing his photographic practice, Jennings admitted that "lightning must paint its own likeness," echoing the insistence of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1977) several decades earlier that photographs are "impressed by Nature'southward manus."30 In i 1890 Philadelphia Record article, Jennings recalled an case when after a startlingly close lightning flash, he "institute he had a fine negative of his sometime friend, only the drinking glass plate was cracked near all the way beyond," as if lightning had intervened straight in the photographic procedure.31 Jennings also expressed a desire to "put on permanent record Franklins' experiment," past flying a kite from a window of a laboratory and allowing a spark to strike a photographic plate from the suspended primal, thus permitting "Jove to write his own autograph."32
The unruly, elusive qualities of lightning, which destroyed belongings and lives, resisted the organizing impulses of the Majestic Meteorological Guild and photographers like Jennings, and wrote its own shorthand in blazing light also colored public reactions to emergent electric lighting that was making its g debut in American cities. A handful of Philadelphia institutions tentatively adopted electric light in the late 1870s. John Wanamaker, Jennings' previous employer, purchased 20-eight Brush arc lamps to low-cal his Grand Depot in 1878. These lamps, using a technology invented and patented by the Brush Electric Company of Cleveland, brightly lit Anecdote Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares of the city, beginning in 1881. Each arc lamp emitted light equal to three hundred gas jets and hung from forty feet high atomic number 26 poles, strung together with wire that carried high-voltage straight current. Past the mid 1890s, more twenty electric companies, including Edison Electric Light Company, operated in Philadelphia, using different systems and supplying different currents.33
Philadelphians initially regarded electric lights with trepidation and anxiety as agents of potential danger that bordered on the supernatural. Urban residents and the press oftentimes drew from the language of thunderstorms and lightning bolts to articulate their unease nigh the unpredictable and unnatural qualities of electrical currents. In December of 1881, a burn down at the Local Telegraph Company in Philadelphia was attributed to a crossing of telegraph wires with those used for electric lighting, creating what the Philadelphia Inquirer described as "an action like a lightning strike."34 This fire sparked a flurry of concerned articles and messages in local newspapers, equally the occurrence fabricated "people fear the exposed electric low-cal wires as much as they now admire the luminescence of electric illumination."35 Considered cruddy, obstructive, and a nuisance when used for telegraphy, multiplying overhead wires were at present also potentially lethal. One paper article, referring to the arc street lamps, wondered at how "the momentary flash that lighted upwards the clouds with a startling glare" was "made permanent and strung forth to a higher place the pavements in a dewdrop chain of brilliance."36 Another article concluded, "Heretofore the expression 'captive lightning,' as applied to electric apparatus, has been a figure of speech, at present it is an actual fact; and electricity must be put in the same category with steam and fire, equally an excellent retainer to man, but a terrible fiend if permitted to escape from his control."37 The printing oftentimes described electricity equally "condensed," "chained," or "captive" lightning, phrases that both celebrated man'southward victory over a powerful, natural energy, but also implied an uneasy containment with destructive potential.38 In his photo of a lightning-struck tree mentioned before (come across fig. 6), Jennings paired the splintered remains of the tree with the erect form of a utility pole and electrical wires (run across fig. half dozen), a couple of which visually intersect the meridian left branches. This juxtaposition suggests a close clan with the electricity running through the wires and the atmospheric electricity that caused the arboreal harm. Electric lights redefined lightning besides: at least 1 article described the subjects of Jennings' photographs every bit "natural electricity," meandering in their wavy course across the sky.39
Fig. 7 William Northward. Jennings, 5ertical Discharge with a 'Knotted' Effect, Oct. 10, 1896, 10:30pm. Silver gelatin print, from Jennings, Jove'southward Autograph Scrapbook. The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.
Jennings combined illumination by both chained and natural lightning in one photograph taken from an function window on the sixth floor of Broad Street Station in Philadelphia (fig. vii). This 1896 image features a vertical discharge of lightning with a "knotted" consequence spreading its tentacle artillery to a higher place Market Street. Ordered car headlights and electrical street lamps, which by then were an increasingly common and accepted sight in the metropolis, additionally lite the street below. 1 Philadelphia newspaper reproduced the epitome, designating it the "Best Picture of Lightning Always Taken."twoscore For the newspaper reader, such an image likely recalled an uneasy link between the two forms of electricity—unleashed and tamed, magnificent and mundane—even as residents became more comfortable with the urban infiltration of electric lights. While Philadelphia residents both wondered and worried over the "captive lighting" transforming their streets and public spaces in the 1880s and 1890s, Jennings' images continued to remind viewers of the unruly qualities of electricity, as it resisted photographic classification and claims of objectivity, asserting its own material force.
Acknowledgements
I would similar to thank Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance for inviting me to participate in their CAA console and this special event of Panorama. Thoughtful comments from them, Catherine Holochwost, and Shana Klein on earlier drafts have profoundly expanded my thinking about lightning photography. I also wish to express my gratitude to the staff at the Franklin Institute and the Library Company of Philadelphia, specially John Alviti, Susannah Carroll, and Nicole Joniec, for their generous assistance with this enquiry. I conducted a significant portion of this research equally a National Endowment of Humanities Post-doctoral Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in the fall of 2015 and I am very grateful for the support of these institutions.
DOI: https://doi.org/x.24926/24716839.1535
PDF: LTI – Capturing Jove
Notes
About the Author(s): Laura Turner Igoe is at Harvard Academy Art Museums
Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/art-and-invention-in-the-united-states/capturing-joves-autograph-late-nineteenth-century-lightning-photography-and-electrical-agency/
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