What if?

[cliveh]

If you were able to show a digital camera to Fox Talbot in 1834, would that have halted his experiments into chemical photography?

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

Probably not. I don't know much about Mr. Talbot but he could have dismissed you as Mephistopheles to his Faust or that you were just a trickster and confidence man and he just hadn't seen through your legerdemain, yet.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

 

[BrianShaw]

Probably not, but if you showed it to Daguerre you’d possibly have a convert!

 

[Don_ih]

You could explain what the device was and then also explain that it would not be possible to make for 150 years. Furthermore, it would not be able to be used for the same period of time, because no computers, no screens for showing images, no printers. That would convince him that what you had had nothing to do with what he was doing.
It's kind of like asking if telling a neolithic man about McDonalds would stop him from hunting.

 

[markjwyatt]

Sounds more like a question of physchology than philosophy, because there is no time machine. But, philosophically, one could argue that Fox Talbot was destined to be part of the beginning of a series of advancements that culminated some time in the 1950s-1990s in a pinnacle of achievement of photochemistry and photoimaging, just as solid state electrionics was destined to sidetrack that advancement in the early 2000s (of course the advanced photochemical technology is still available, and perhaps still slowly advancing).

 

[cramej]

What would the people of 1834 do with a digital camera if the don't have the rest of the accoutrements? You'd also need to bring with you more than a century of manufacturing knowledge, battery technology, electrical engineering, computer science, petroleum and plastics engineering, glass technology, lens design, etc., etc.

We wouldn't be where we are if it weren't for the adventures through traditional chemical photographic techniques.

 

[markjwyatt]

What would the people of 1834 do with a digital camera if the don't have the rest of the accoutrements? You'd also need to bring with you more than a century of manufacturing knowledge, battery technology, electrical engineering, computer science, petroleum and plastics engineering, glass technology, lens design, etc., etc.

We wouldn't be where we are if it weren't for the adventures through traditional chemical photographic techniques.

If you tried this 100-200 years earlier, they probably would have burned you at a stake!

 

[BrianShaw]

If you tried this 100-200 years earlier, they probably would have burned you at a stake!

Even today… Around this site folks seem to get burned at the stake for using digital!

 

[Truzi]

What would Larry Talbot have thought?

 

[cliveh]

Probably not. I don't know much about Mr. Talbot but he could have dismissed you as Mephistopheles to his Faust or that you were just a trickster and confidence man and he just hadn't seen through your legerdemain, yet.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

I like this quote.

 

[4season]

It might have fascinated people, but practical value would be pretty much zilch in an era when gas lighting was still a new thing. George Eastman's first rollfilm cameras might have had far more practical impact.

 

[Maris]

Fox Talbot was trying to make a different sort of picture to the ones that existed in his time. Ultimately there are only two types of realistic picture.

The first kind is an assembly-type picture reconstructed, piece by piece, from a description of something. The description is in an abstract code, perhaps an array of voltages in a computer memory or a sequence of neuro-peptides in an artist's brain and, as always, the description is not the thing being described.

The coded description is used as a set of instructions for the guided operation of a mark-making thing. Common "mark-making things" include an artist's hand wielding a paint brush, pencil, burin, etc. A modern version could be some sort of electro-mechanical printer. A typical end result is an ordered array of colored spots or lines on a substrate. In Fox Talbot's day these assembly-type pictures included paintings, drawings, etchings, mezzotints, engravings, wood cuts, etc.

Away from assembly-type pictures there is a small universe of pictures obtained by impression-type methods. Impressions include life casts, death masks, wax impressions, papier mache moulds and even the caveman's muddy hand stencil.

Photography as first mooted is an impression-type process. A real optical image enters a light sensitive surface and causes changes that result in a pattern of marks that form a picture. This picture has a one to one congruence with the image that made it. There is no involvement of coded descriptions or mark-making machines.

I think that's why the invention of photography was so fresh in a world that had already, for centuries, been glutted with millions of assembly-type pictures. Fox Talbot succeeded in having "nature" make direct pictures of herself without the process being edited through a mind.

 

[Vaughn]

Perhaps Cliveh's question could be better asked; If there has been no discoveries in photo-chemical reproduction until we had figured out the possibilities of electro/digital reproduction (include magnetic tape, etc), would we have had the curiousity to explore chemical-based reproduction? And if 'discovered', be put into production on a commercial scale?

Hell if I know...

 

[cliveh]

Fox Talbot was trying to make a different sort of picture to the ones that existed in his time. Ultimately there are only two types of realistic picture.

The first kind is an assembly-type picture reconstructed, piece by piece, from a description of something. The description is in an abstract code, perhaps an array of voltages in a computer memory or a sequence of neuro-peptides in an artist's brain and, as always, the description is not the thing being described.

The coded description is used as a set of instructions for the guided operation of a mark-making thing. Common "mark-making things" include an artist's hand wielding a paint brush, pencil, burin, etc. A modern version could be some sort of electro-mechanical printer. A typical end result is an ordered array of colored spots or lines on a substrate. In Fox Talbot's day these assembly-type pictures included paintings, drawings, etchings, mezzotints, engravings, wood cuts, etc.

Away from assembly-type pictures there is a small universe of pictures obtained by impression-type methods. Impressions include life casts, death masks, wax impressions, papier mache moulds and even the caveman's muddy hand stencil.

Photography as first mooted is an impression-type process. A real optical image enters a light sensitive surface and causes changes that result in a pattern of marks that form a picture. This picture has a one to one congruence with the image that made it. There is no involvement of coded descriptions or mark-making machines.

I think that's why the invention of photography was so fresh in a world that had already, for centuries, been glutted with millions of assembly-type pictures. Fox Talbot succeeded in having "nature" make direct pictures of herself without the process being edited through a mind.

Is that a yes or no to my original question?

 

[markjwyatt]

Is that a yes or no to my original question?

I will not answer for @Maris , but a digital image would also be an impression type image, and presuming there was a means to view the image (e.g., an led screen maybe), Mr. Talbot would have recognized the image as that. I don’t know if it would have stopped his work, but he would have lofty hard to achieve goals and may have gotten frustrated.

 

[Sirius Glass]

This is one of them "How many fairy elephants can dance on the head of a pin?" question for those that do not have enough to keep them busy every day.

 

[markjwyatt]

This is one of them "How many fairy elephants can dance on the head of a pin?" question for those that do not have enough to keep them busy every day.

This is the ethics and philosophy thread. Who do you think argued "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"? (philosophers)

 

[Don_ih]

Who do you think argued "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"?

Theologians.

 

[guangong]

A more plausible question: what if Talbot had been more interested in charcoal and paper than in chemicals? Nonetheless, there are too many examples of simultaneous discoveries to believe that the history of photography would have been changed too much. This is not meant to minimize his achievements.

 

[removed account4]

yes and no... he would have stopped his experiments, daguerre too, niepce too.. they were just interested in making images they didn't care about the BS that people now confuse for purity and image making. but they were also rich science geeks who who knows

 

[markjwyatt]

Theologians.

Was much less if any seperation at that time, but I think that is more correct.