Science and Fiction: James Nasmyth's Photographic Images of the Moon

Abstract

aving made his fortune as an industrialist and inventor with his Bridgewater Foundry in Manchester, the mechanical engineerJames Nasmyth was able to retire in his late forties, in 1856, in order to devote himself to his longstanding passion for astronomy (Nasmyth, Autobiography 329). His main astronomical project, from 1842, had been a sustained series of lunar observations, culminating in his publication The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (Nasmyth and Carpenter).' Among the reasons Nasmyth's book is noteworthy is that it was one of the first books to be illustrated by photo-mechanical prints. This new technique allowed photographs to be published through standard industrial print processes using permanent carbonbased inks (Jussim 52), and represented a significant improvement upon the more laborious and fugitive silver-chemistry darkroom processes used in the earliest books with photographic illustrations (Gernsheim). In photo-mechanical printing, light is used to prepare printing surfaces: because the process can be applied to both photographic and line originals (Woodbury 363), it provided the technical basis for mass-produced illustrated publication from the late nineteenth century until the advent of digital print technology. Nasmyth produced twenty-four photographs consciously designed for publication in this innovative medium, with the intention of using his visual evidence to carry some of the argument of his book. Although some successful photographic images of the moon had already been shown in public exhibitions--such as the 1851 daguerrotype byJohn Adams Whipple, or photographs on paper by Warren de la Rue, Henry Draper, and Lewis Rutherford in the 1850s and 1860s-they had not been directly disseminated in print. Such images were rare, for they required exceptional technical dexterity, luck, and long observational knowledge on the part of the photographic astronomer; furthermore, they