The last significant portion of material that remained in private hands relating to Henry Talbot, pioneer of photography.
While Talbot is best known today for his invention of two photographic processes-- the photogenic drawing, announced in 1839, and the calotype, patented in 1841--his achievements went far beyond photography. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his name endures in Talbot’s curve (mathematics), Talbot’s law (optics), and the talbot (physics). He published nearly seventy works in fields including electricity, optics, physics, mathematics, etymology, philology, classics, Assyrian, and photography, some of which remain at the forefront of research today. He was one of the first scholars to decipher cuneiform, and served as Member of Parliament for Chippenham.
The Personal Archive spans his wide interests and areas of scholarship, offering a wealth of manuscripts, printed material, photographs, albums, and artefacts that illumine the private, social, and intellectual spheres that informed the discoveries of this Victorian polymath. It reveals how the range of scholarly pursuits and the interests he shared with his family shaped his ground-breaking work, offering examples of the educative roles of women within the family, and of women as artists, botanists, linguists, and as collectors and practitioners of the new photographic art.
