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 THE DAGUERREOTYPE: AN ARCHIVE OF SOURCE TEXTS, GRAPHICS, AND EPHEMERA


  The research archive of Gary W. Ewer regarding the history of the daguerreotype

On this day (June 5) in the year 1846, the following notice appeared in the "Boston Daily Evening Transcript": - - - - - - - - A CURIOUS DAGUERREOTYPE. A phonographic[sic] artist of Belfast, Ireland, during the late solar eclipse, undertook, like a transatlantic contemporary, to let the sun take his own likeness. By way of experiment, merely, he planted his apparatus before the partially obscured luminary, when a rather singular phenomenon presented itself as the result. Two suns, each undergoing an eclipse, were produced at the same time, by the mystic lens on the metallic plate, with this remarkable difference, however, between the two, that the one showed an opaque, the other a luminous surface; the former being encircled by silvery clouds, the latter standing out like a radiant speck on the ethereal vault. The explanation of this beautiful prodigy, the joint production of art and nature, has not been given. -------------------------------------------------------------- 06-05-99

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