How Photography Saw the Light.

The story goes that the visitors of Italian physicist Giambattista Della Porta (1535?-1615) were shocked. On the wall in front of them, images of small upside-down people were moving around. Panic-stricken, the onlookers scurried out of the room. Della Porta was put on trial for sorcery!
SO MUCH for trying to amuse his guests by introducing them to a camera obscura—literally, in Latin, “dark chamber.” The principle on which the camera works is simple, but the results can be spectacular. How does it work?
When light enters a dark box or room through a tiny hole, an inverted picture of the outside is projected on the far wall. What Della Porta’s guests saw was nothing but actors performing outside. The camera obscura was a forerunner of the modern camera. Today you may be one of the millions of people who own a camera or at least have used the ubiquitous, inexpensive disposable camera.
The camera obscura was not even new in Della Porta’s day. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) observed the principle on which the camera would later work. The 10th-century Arabic scholar Alhazen vividly described it, and the 15th-century painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it in his notebooks. The 16th-century introduction of the lens enhanced the accuracy of the camera, and many artists used it for accurate renderings of perspective and scale. But in spite of many attempts, making the resulting images permanent remained elusive until the 19th century.

French physicist Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce possibly started his quest to make permanent photos as early as 1816. But his real breakthrough came when he was experimenting with lithography and came across a light-sensitive substance called bitumen of Judaea. Sometime in the mid-1820’s, he put a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera obscura facing a window of his estate and exposed it for eight hours. Not even the most inexperienced of today’s amateur photographers would be proud of the blurry picture of a building, a tree, and a barn that resulted, but Niepce had reason to be. His picture was most likely the first permanent photograph ever taken!
To develop his method further, in 1829, Niepce entered a partnership with a dynamic entrepreneur named Louis Daguerre. In the years following Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre made some important progress. He used silver iodide as a coating on copper plates. This proved to be more light sensitive than bitumen. By accident he found that when he treated the plate with mercury fumes after exposure, a latent picture appeared clearly. This reduced the exposure time dramatically. When Daguerre later discovered that washing the plate with a salt solution prevented the picture from darkening over time, photography was ready to take the world by storm.

When Daguerre’s invention, called daguerreotype, was presented to the public in 1839, the reaction was overwhelming. Scholar Helmut Gernsheim writes in his book The History of Photography: “Perhaps no other invention ever captured the imagination of the public to such a degree and conquered the world with such lightning rapidity as the daguerreotype.” An eyewitness to the public release wrote: “An hour later, all the opticians’ shops were besieged, but could not rake together enough instruments to satisfy the onrushing army of would-be daguerreotypists; a few days later you could see in all the squares of Paris three-legged dark-boxes planted in front of churches and palaces. All the physicists, chemists, and learned men of the capital were polishing silvered plates, and even the better-class grocers found it impossible to deny themselves the pleasure of sacrificing some of their means on the altar of progress, evaporating it in iodine and consuming it in mercury vapour.” The Paris press quickly named the craze daguerréotypomanie.
The outstanding quality of the daguerreotypes moved British scientist John Herschel to write: “It is hardly too much to call them miraculous.” Some even ascribed magical powers to the invention.
But not everybody hailed the new invention. In 1856 the king of Naples banned photography, possibly because it was thought to be associated with “the evil eye.” When seeing a daguerreotype, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed: “From today painting is dead!” The invention also caused great anxiety among painters who saw it as a threat to their livelihood. One commentator expressed the fears of some when he said: “Photography’s stringent truth to optical reality could nullify the individual’s apprehension of beauty.” In addition, photographic pictures were even criticized for the relentless realism with which they shattered cherished illusions of beauty and youth.

William Henry Fox Talbot, an English physicist, believed that he had invented photography and was thus taken aback by the announcement of Daguerre’s invention. Talbot had been putting silver-chloride-coated sheets of paper in a camera obscura. He waxed the resulting negative for transparency, placed it over another coated paper, and then exposed it to sunlight, thus producing a positive image.
Although initially a lot less popular and of inferior quality, Talbot’s process proved to have greater potential. It allowed for multiple copies of one single negative, and paper copies were cheaper and easier to handle than the fragile daguerreotypes. Modern photography is still based on Talbot’s process, whereas the daguerreotype, in spite of its initial popularity, proved to be a dead end.
Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot were, however, not the only contenders for the title of Father of Photography. Following Daguerre’s 1839 announcement, at least 24 men—from Norway in the north to Brazil in the south—stepped forward claiming to have invented photography.

One social reformer, Jacob August Riis, early on saw photography as a golden opportunity to bring poverty and suffering to the attention of the public. In 1880 he started taking pictures of New York City slums after dark by using burning magnesium powder in a frying pan as a flash—a method not entirely without risk. He twice set ablaze the house in which he was working, and once his own clothes caught fire. His pictures are said to have been one of the reasons President Theodore Roosevelt undertook a number of social reforms when he moved into the White House. The persuasive power of a series of scenic photographs by William Henry Jackson also prompted the U.S. Congress in 1872 to make Yellowstone the world’s first national park.

In the late 1880’s, many potential photographers were still held back because of the cost and complexity of photography. But in 1888 when George Eastman invented the Kodak, a portable easy-to-use box camera containing a roll of flexible film, he paved the way for unlimited amateur photography.
After exposing the roll, the customer would send the entire camera to the factory. There the film was processed and the camera was reloaded and sent back, along with the developed photos—all this at a fairly low cost. The slogan “You push the button, we do the rest” was no exaggeration.
Photography for the masses had been born, and the billions of exposures taken annually today indicate that its acceptance has never abated. And now, adding to its popularity, there are digital cameras that define an image in megapixels. They use a tiny memory stick that may hold hundreds of photos. High-quality prints can even be made using a home computer and a printer. No doubt about it, photography has come a long way.

THE DALMATIN BIBLE

THE last of the barrels with their valuable contents arrived in Slovenia in the late 1500’s. For two years they had been in transport by various routes. To disguise their contents, the barrels had been labeled “playing cards” or “store supplies.” Concealed inside were leather-bound volumes of the first complete Bible in the Slovenian language.
The valuable consignment was the fulfillment of the dream of two dedicated men—Jurij Dalmatin and Primož Trubar, who devoted their lives to translating the Bible into the common language of their people. While these men may not be featured in many history books, their names can be added to the list of those who made a great contribution to early Bible translation.
Dalmatin, the man responsible for the secret transport of the Bibles, had included one special richly bound copy for Trubar, his friend and adviser. Let us consider the challenges these two men faced in making the Bible available in the common tongue of their fellow countrymen.

In the 16th century, the Holy Roman Empire, which was closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church, was still entrenched in most of Europe. However, the Protestant Reformation was well under way, and the effects of the movement had filtered into the towns and villages of what is present-day Slovenia. Trubar, a local clergyman there, was among the first to adopt Protestant convictions.
Since Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, only a privileged few who were schooled in that ancient tongue could understand church services and the Bible. Yet, the Reformers said that church services should be held in a language understood by all. Therefore, by the mid-1500’s, some Bible passages were read in the local Slovenian language during church services. This was made possible because the Slovenian equivalent of certain texts was written in the margins of the Latin missal, or Mass book, that was used by the clergy.
However, Trubar wanted to have the entire Bible in Slovenian. Since there was as yet no Slovenian alphabet, Trubar invented one, and in 1550 he wrote the first book printed in the Slovenian language. In it he included some Bible verses from Genesis. Later, he also translated the Psalms into Slovenian and eventually the entire New Testament, or Christian Greek Scriptures.
Yet, Trubar recognized that he did not possess the language skills needed to carry out his ambition to translate the entire Bible into Slovenian. In Jurij Dalmatin, a gifted young student, he saw someone who could help him accomplish his goal.

 Dalmatin was born into a poor family in 1547 in a village called Krško, located in what is today southern Slovenia. He attended the local school run by an early convert to Protestantism, and this greatly influenced his later religious inclinations. With the support of Trubar as well as a schoolteacher and the local parish, Dalmatin attended a religious school and later went to a university in Germany. He thereby perfected his Latin and German, learned Hebrew and Greek, and completed his studies in philosophy and theology.
  Although Dalmatin studied abroad, he was encouraged by Trubar to value and cultivate his mother tongue, Slovenian. When Dalmatin was attending university, while he was still in his 20's, he began the great task of translating the Bible into his mother language ultimately making Trubar's fervent wish to have the complete Bible in Slovenian his main goal in life.

 Plunging into the project with great enthusiasm, Dalmatin began by translating the Hebrew Scriptures. Apparently, he translated from the original languages but with close reference to Martin Luther’s German translation of the Latin Vulgate. As for Trubar, by 1577 he had translated the entire Christian Greek Scriptures into Slovenian, as mentioned previously. Dalmatin now corrected and improved Trubar’s text, once again relying heavily on Luther’s German Bible translation. He removed a lot of Trubar’s Germanisms and made the translation more uniform. Dalmatin may have used his knowledge of Greek in his translation work, but scholars still debate whether he consulted early Greek texts or not.

Because the Slovenian alphabet had been introduced only a few decades before, Dalmatin faced a daunting task. Moreover, the vocabulary was small, and Slovenian reference books were nonexistent. Therefore, it required a great deal of ingenuity to render the text into understandable Slovenian.
The Counter Reformation movement also added to the difficulties. Since the printer in Slovenia was exiled, Bible printing had to be done on foreign soil. This was why camouflage was needed when Bibles were shipped into the country. Yet, despite the obstacles, Dalmatin achieved his goal in only ten years, apparently while he was still in his early 30’s.
Under Dalmatin’s supervision the first printing of 1,500 copies of the Bible took place in seven months. Many called the Bible a literary masterpiece and a work of art, as it was beautifully illustrated with 222 woodcuts. Many of the original Bibles are still in existence, and the translation has been used as a basis for modern-day versions of the Bible in Slovenian. The work of these two men has contributed to the fact that today Slovenians can read God’s Word in their mother tongue.

 THE DIVINE NAME
  Dalmatin included the following explanation in the foreword of his translation of the Holy Bible: “Wherever the word LORD is printed in capital letters, this means the LORD God alone whose name is יהוה, Jehovah, in the Jewish language. This name belongs only to the LORD God and no one else.”

The Anthony Roll.

The Anthony Roll is a rocord of ships of the English Tudor navy of the 1540s, named after it's creator, Anthony Anthony. It originally consisted of three rolls of vellum, depicting 58 naval vessels along with information on their size, crew, armament, and basic equipment

The rolls were presented to King Henry VIII in 1546, and were kept in the royal library. In 1680 Charles II

gave two of the rolls to Samuel Pepys, who had them cut up and made into a single volume, which is now in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The third roll remained in the royal collection

until it was given by William IV to his daughter, Mary Fox, who sold it to the British Museum in 1858; it is now owned by the British Library. The Anthony Roll is the only known fully illustrated inventory of ships if the English navy in the Tudor period. while the inventories listed in its text have proven to be highly accurate, most of the ship illustrations are rudimentary and made according to a set forrmular. The only known contemporary depictions of prominent Tudor vessels like the Henry Grace a Dieu and the Mary Rose are contained in the Anthony Roll.

   Since the Mary Rose sank by accident in 1545 and was successfully salvaged in the 1982, comparison between the information in the Roll and the physical evidence of the Mary Rose has provided new insights into the study of the naval history of the period.