I was business traveling years ago and at the hotel I came upon a group of guys that were there for a daguerreotype convention. If you ever wanted to know anything about daguerreotype they were more than happy to share. I think after a few they had tried to get me into a starter set.

Patents are merely tools that get you on the negotiating table. It doesn't guarantee you a business or fame.

If you aren't already famous or wealthy or connected, there is no guarantee that you are able to acquire wealth through this way. Even with connections and wealth, there is no guarantee of a business.

I myself would hope to one day to use patents for posterity, but not to enforce a monopoly. Businesses will look at what I have and what they have and laugh in my faces and tell me that I have to pry their money from their lawyers' dead hands.

That's fine. I don't anticipate relying on monopolies or licensing as a revenue source.

> Considerably less well known—in his native UK especially—is William Henry Fox Talbot

I'm really not sure about the premise of this article. Fox-Talbot is not especially unknown in the UK, if anything I'd say he was actually pretty well known here.

As a child I can definitely remember seeing BBC TV programmes like Blue Peter celebrating his work.

If you'd have asked me as a child who invented photography I probably would have said his name because that's what we were taught.

I might have known the name Louis Daguerre was involved somehow in an early rival process but I would have also known that modern photography (at the time) was based on Fox-Talbot's concept of the negative.

A few years ago, I edited together a version of Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature because I wanted one and there really didn't seem to be any readily available.

It's here on Blurb:

https://www.blurb.com/books/8879159-pencil-of-nature

I used images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and text from Gutenberg.

It's not perfect and the Blurb proprietary author file disappeared by the time I got the proof copies. I didn't have the energy to recreate it because what I made was good enough.

And better than anything else I could find back then, but maybe things have changed.

David Octavius Hill had a calotype studio on Calton Hill in Edinburgh and took many fine calotypes of the city, and scots people and scenery.

https://www.google.com/search?q=david+octavius+hill+artwork

https://www.moma.org/artists/2648

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/search?artists%5B5351%5D=5...

My mother organised an exhibition of Hill & Adamson's work when I was a child in 1970:

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1381628

D.O.Hill Calotypes are rare and sell for high prices at auction:

https://www.invaluable.com/artist/hill-david-octavius-ggaa1b...

some of us still make calotypes

https://www.flickr.com/groups/1384661@N22/

You could ask the same question about the inventor of the telephone because it wasn't Bell.

"famous"

Every single time I see JSTOR, I remember Aaron Swartz. Rest in Peace.

The name isn’t nearly as cool.

Stupid sub-headline, Fox Talbot's legacy IS all of modern photography - because he created the negative, which meant reproduction, and also was able to fix images into permanence.

Daguerreotypes are pretty artifacts in comparison. Fox Talbot was the Gutenberg of photography.

I have posted a related resource on the entire history of printed images. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37562880

I probably wouldn't know about daguerreotypes either if it wasn't for Life is Strange

Instead, he dedicated his energies to an etching-based photographic printing process he dubbed ‘photoglyphic engraving’—an important step towards establishing the processes that allowed photographic images to be mechanically copied in newspapers and magazines in the early twentieth century.

I have wondered for years how this was achieved. Photographs were produced by a chemical process, so how did they etch into a lithograph or a linotype machine etc. to print newspapers?

I am really hoping to find a book on the history of science or technology. How people developed from, say, the four humors and phlogiston to modern theories. Or how the Copernican model and Kepler’s laws led to Newton. Or how atoms were discovered, subatomic particles, the space between atoms, or what people inferred when they didn’t have the tools to simply look at it. How Francis and Crick actually discovered DNA’s shape etc etc.

I want to see the mistakes along the way, like luminiferous ether, or the age of the earth before radioactivity was discovered.

Is there such a book or series ??