Notes — Continued (2 of 2)

1. Scheele investigated the effects of light on silver chloride, publishing his results in 1777. He demonstrated that silver was the blackening agent in silver chloride (luna cornua) exposed to the Sun, that ammonia dissolves silver chloride, and that the blue end of the spectrum blackens silver chloride the fastest. Carl William Scheele, Chemical Observations and Experiments on Air and Fire, trans. Johann Reinhold Forster (London: J. Johnson, 1780), 81–82, 90–91.

2. Trevor H. Levere, “Dr Thomas Beddoes: Chemistry, Medicine, and the Perils of Democracy,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 63, no. 3 (2009): 221.

3. Dorothy Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D. (1760–1808): Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing, 1984), 74, 128, 220.

4. See Trevor H. Levere, “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: The Case of Dr. Thomas Beddoes,” in Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science, ed. R. M. Brain, R. S. Cohen, and O. Knudsen (New York: Springer, 2007).

5. The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele, trans. Thomas Beddoes (London: John Murray, 1786).

6. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Fulhame, An Essay on Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting (London: Cooper, 1794).

7. Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (Bristol, England: Bulgin and Rosser, 1796), 6:32.

8. For a keen reading of this case, see Rana Hogarth, “Of Black Skin and Biopower: Lessons from the Eighteenth Century,” American Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2019): 837–47.

9. Thomas Thomson, System of Chemistry, 5th ed. (London: Baldwin, 1814), 4:480.

10. John Edmond Stock, “Appendix: Docteur Beddoes Commonplace Books,” in Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes, M.D. (London: John Murray, 1811), lxvi.

11. Doctor Biett et al., Abrégé pratique des maladies de la peau (Paris: Béchet jeune, 1838). Tattoo removal with a silver nitrate pencil is mentioned in Charles Perrier, Les Criminels (Lyon, France: Storck, 1905), 2:393.

12. Pierre François Olive Rayer, Traité théorique des maladies de la peau (Paris: Baillère, 1827), 2:215, 218.

13. Rana Hogarth documents cases of vitiligo in the 1790s in “The Strange Case of Hannah West: Skin Colour and the Search for Racial Difference,” Social History of Medicine 29, no. 3 (2016): 557–72. For argyria, see I. A. Albers, “Observation of a Change in Colour in the Skin, Produced by the Internal Use of Nitrate of Silver,” Eclectic Repertory and Analytical Review 7 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1817), 209.

14. William Charles Wells, “An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind, Part of Whose Skin Resembles that of a Negro,” in Two Essays (London: Constable, 1818). It was presented to the Royal Society in 1813.

15. Nicholas J. Wade and Benjamin W. Tatler nonetheless champion Wells’s work without a word on his racism in The Moving Tablet of the Eye: The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. Editors Nicholas J. Wade et al. celebrate Wells’s “admirable personal qualities” in “The Singular Vision of William Charles Wells (1757–1817),” Journal of the History of Neuroscience 20 (2011): 13.

16. Edward Bancroft, Experimental Researches Concerning the Philosophy of Permanent Colours (London: Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1794), 1:34, 45.

17. See Sybille Fisher, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

18. Clarkson wrote in 1785: “Suppose we were to take a common globe; then begin at the equator to paint every country along the meridian line in succession from thence to the poles; and to paint them with the same colour which prevails in the respective inhabitants of each, we should see black, with which we had been obliged to begin, insensibly turn to an olive, and the olive, through as many intermediate colours, to a white. . . . The difference would consist wholly in shades of the same colour” (Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, 3rd ed. [Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1787], 131). Delany proposed a pigment called “rouge” to explain the skin color spectrum, arguing that all humans share the same pigmentation in differing degrees. He chose the term after the Hebrew word Adam meaning “red earth” but also because human blood is red and because “the color of the blackest African is produced by identically the same essential coloring matter that gives the ‘rosy cheeks and ruby lips’ to the fairest and most delicately beautiful white lady” (Martin Delany, Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, 2nd ed. [Philadelphia: Harper & Brother, 1880], 27). See Mandy A. Reid, “Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins,” Utopian Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 91–103.

19. Thomas Wedgwood, “Experiments and Observations on the Production of Light from Different Bodies, by Heat and by Attrition,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 82 (1792): 28–47, 270–82.

20. Ritter’s article “Chemical Polarity in Light” makes confusing claims about optics, phlogiston, and metaphysics, hampering its discovery in England and France in 1802–1803. See Jan Freks, Heiko Weber, and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, “Reception and Discovery: The Nature of Johann Wilhem Ritter’s Invisible Rays,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009): 143–56; Antje Pfannkuchen, “The Dynamic Polarity of Romantic Light,” Germanic Review 92 (2017): 355–67.

21. “Modifications of Light,” Papers of William Herschel, RGO/35/170/24, folio 10, microfilm, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK. I am unable to identify “G. W. I.”

22. Herschel notes of Marat’s work, “This contradicts known facts,” or “M. Marat proceeds now in his mistaken reasoning upon appearances he does not understand,” but he also drafted a “Memorandum of M. Marat’s Good Experiments.” “Miscellaneous Notes,” Papers of William Herschel, RGO/35/170/24, folios 55, microfilm, 142–46, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK.

23. See Jacques de Cock, Marat avant 1789 (Geneva: Fantasques éditions, 2003), 331–32.

24. In 1783, Marat congratulated his friend Philippe Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent for being “the creator of a great and new colony” in Trinidad (de Cock, Marat, 341).

25. See Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 291–328; de Cock, Marat, 1437–62.

26. Jean-Paul Marat, Recherches physiques sur le feu (Paris: Jombert, 1780).

27. One experiment used a large portable camera obscura moved by a clock mechanism to follow the Sun. Jean-Paul Marat, Découvertes de M. Marat sur le feu, l’électricité et la lumière (Paris: Clousier, 1779), 13n1.

28. Alfred Bonnardot, Histoire artistique et archéologique de la gravure en France (Paris: Deflorenne, 1845), 134–35.

29. Jean-Paul Marat, Découvertes de M. Marat, docteur en médecine & médecin des gardes-du-corps de Monseigneur le Comte d’Artois, sur la lumière (Londres et Paris: Jombert, 1780), iv.

30. See Hasok Chang, “The Hidden History of Phlogiston,” Hyle 16, no. 2 (2010): 47–79; Simon Schaffer, “‘The Great Laboratories of the Universe’: William Herschel on Matter Theory and Planetary Life,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1980): 93.

31. William Hyde Wollaston, “A Method of Examining Refractive and Dispersive Powers, by Prismatic Reflection,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 92 (1802): 378, 379.

32. Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Genius Who Proved Newton Wrong and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Surprising Feats (New York: Plume Books, 2007), 27.

33. George Peacock, Life of Thomas Young (London: John Murray, 1855), 44.

34. Thomas Young, “Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 90 (1800): 106–54. See the excellent article by Peter Pesic, “Thomas Young’s Musical Optics: Translating Sound into Light,” Osiris 28, no. 1 (2013): 15–39.

35. Young stated in 1807 that interferences were analogous to tides “in the harbor of Batsha” (Robinson, Last Man, 251n108). The Bai Chay estuary of Hanoi Bay has unique tide patterns due to multiple inlets. In 1684, Edmond Halley puzzled over these patterns, which Newton interpreted as interferences (the first use of this concept) in the Principia (Isaac Newton, The Principia, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 238–42). A British captain was “informed by the inhabitants hereabouts” that the annual cycle of tides was tied to the Moon, adding, “I have found the predictions of the natives confirmed by my own observations.” This translation of Native navigational and astronomical knowledge into the WTL is a striking example of transcultural transfer to and appropriation by Western science (“An Account of the Course of the Tides at Tonqueen in a Letter from M. Francis Davenport July 15, 1678, with the Theory of Them, at the Barr of Tonqueen, by the Learned Edmund Halley F. R. S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 14, no. 162 [1684]: 677–84).

36. Thomas Young, “Experiments and Calculations Relative to Physical Optics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 94 (1804): 16.

37. Thomas Young, “On the Theory of Light and Colour,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 92 (1802): 42.

38. “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq. With Observations by Humphry Davy,” Journal of the Royal Institution I (1802): 167–70. See Richard Buckley Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer (London: Duckworth, 1903), 187.

39. “Experiments on the Separation of Light and Heat by Refraction. In a Letter from Sir H. C. Englefield, Bart. F. R. S. to Thomas Young, M. D. F. R. S. From the Journal of the Royal Institution, p. 202,” Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts 3 (1802): 125–30. Sir H. C. Englefield writes: “I have only to add that in the course of the month of June 1802, I repeated most of these experiments with the same apparatus [solar microscope, camera obscura, prism, three thermometers], in presence of Mr. Davy, with the most complete success. . . . At the suggestion of Mr. Davy, we tried several experiments with respect to the power of the several coloured rays in rendering Canton’s phosphorus luminous” (129). He concludes: “There was great reason to suspect that this power, like that of blackening the nitrate of silver, extended beyond the visible blue ray” (130).

40. Beaumont Newhall opts for Lewis (Latent Image: The Discovery of Photography, [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983], 23). For Wedgwood workshop workers, see Larry Stewart, “Assistants to Enlightenment: William Lewis, Alexandre Chisholm and Invisible Technicians in the Industrial Revolution,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 62 (2008): 17–29. Photochemical reactions are described in Joseph Priestley’s classic The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colors (London: Johnson, 1772).

41. Watt to Josiah Wedgwood: “Your instructions as to the Silver Pictures about which, when at home, I will make experiments” (Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, 186). The letter was lost after Eliza Meteyard published it (Life of Josiah Wedgwood [London: Hurst and Backett, 1866], 2:585–86). Meteyard writes: “Dr. Turner of Liverpool, as it was well known, had either invented or brought to tolerable perfection the art of copying prints upon glass by striking off impressions with a coloured solution of silver, and fixing them on glass by baking on an iron plate in a heat sufficient to incorporate the solution with the glass” (586). This is copied verbatim (without attribution!) from a footnote of an 1831 biography of Joseph Priestley that begins, “I believe it was Dr. Turner of Liverpool who first invented or brought . . . ,” the passage then being the same, with one crucial added sentence: “Some of them are very neatly performed, producing transparent copies in a bright yellow upon clear glass” (John Towill Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, vol. 1 [London: R. Hunter, 1831], 76). Meteyard conveniently leaves out mention of the “bright yellow” pictures. Matthew Turner was a chemist who taught at the Warrington Academy from 1762 to 1765 and taught Priestley chemistry (Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 54, 95).

42. In 1788, Josiah Wedgwood (son) reported to his father Matthew Boulton’s use of fulminating silver for plating (Katherine Eufemia Farrer, Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood, 1781–1794 [London: Women’s Printing Society, 1906], 73–74). Barnes mentions the experiments of Josiah Wedgwood Sr. with George Stubbs on projecting silhouettes onto ceramic to make cameos (Alan Barnes, “Negative and Positive Images: Erasmus Darwin, Tom Wedgwood, and the Origins of Photography,” in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C. U. M. Smith and Robert Arnott [Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005], 241n13).

43. Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston (#17737–96), cited in Robert E. Schofield, “Josiah Wedgwood, Industrial Chemist,” Chymia 5 (1959): 191.

44. R. W. Darwin, “New Experiments on the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 76 (1786): 313–48.

45. E. Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1796), vii.

46. Francis Doherty, “Tom Wedgwood, Coleridge and ‘Metaphysics,’” Neophilogus 71, no. 2 (1987): 305–15.

47. [Thomas Wedgwood], “An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Notion of Distance. Drawn Up from Notes Left by the Late Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.,” Quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts 3 (1817): 1–12. This essay belongs to many unpublished writings of Thomas Wedgwood on education, philosophy, and perception.

48. Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 122–28.

49. November 12, 1800, Coleridge to Josiah Wedgwood Jr., quoted in Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, 111.

50. September 16, 1803, Coleridge to Thomas Wedgwood, quoted in Litchfield, 146.

51. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Leavitt, Lord, and Co., 1834), 36fn256.

52. Philippe R. Girard, “Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799–1803,” French Historical Society 32, no. 4 (2009): 587–618.

53. Loi relative à la traite des Noirs et au régime des Colonies [Law pertaining to the slave trade and to the slaving regime of the colonies], 30 Floréal, an X [May 20, 1802]. See Jean-François Niort and Jérémy Richard, “A propos de la découverte de l’arrêté consulaire du 16 juillet 1802 et du rétablissement de l’ancien ordre colonial (spécialement de l’esclavage) à la Guadeloupe,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 152 (2009): 31–59.

54. Jennifer Heuer, “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 515–48.

55. See Serge Sochon, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, un savant issu des Lumières (Paris: Christian, 2004), 77–79, 96–97.

56. That point is underlined by Casper Hakfoort, Optics in the Age of Euler: Conceptions of the Nature of Light, 1700–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 184.

57. Maurice Crosland, The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I (London: Heinemann, 1967), 121, 254–59.

58. See James Lequeux, François Arago, un savant généreux: Physique et astronomie au XIXè siècle (Paris: EDP Sciences, 2008), 30–40.

59. See Paul Murdin, Full Meridian of Glory: Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth (New York: Springer, 2009).

60. See Jeff Z. Buchwald, The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light: Optical Theory and Experiment in the Early Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Theresa Leavitt, A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse (New York: Norton, 2013).

61. Manuel Bonnet and Jean-Louis Marignier, Niépce: Correspondance et papiers (Saint-Loup de Varenne, France: Maison Nicéphore Niépce, 2003), 1:336–56.

62. For reprography technology and copying machines at that time, see Hunter, Painting with Fire.

63. Augustin Fresnel, “Mémoire sur la diffraction de la lumière,” Annales de physique et de chimie 1 (1816): 245. Arago and Fresnel conducted a stealthy campaign for the WTL, publishing an essay on polarized light in 1819 accompanied by a translation of Francesco Grimaldi’s 1665 proposition on interferences stating that “a lit body can become darker when a new light is added to that which it receives” (François Arago and Augustin Fresnel, “Sur l’action que les rayons de lumière polarisée exercent les uns sur les autres,” and “Extrait d’un ouvrage du P. Grimaldi,” Annales de physique et de chimie 10 [1819]: 288–306, 306–312).

64. Augustin Fresnel, “De La Lumière,” in Jean Riffaut, Supplément à la traduction française de la cinquième edition du Système de chimie par Th. Thomson (Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1822), 64.

65. Augustin Fresnel, “Post-Scriptum,” in Riffaut, Supplément, 536.

66. Arago made only the following note in the procès-verbaux of the Bureau des Longitudes on August 22, 1821: “A sunray falling on silver muriate decomposes that salt. But two rays falling together on that point under conditions of interference prevents decomposition.” Arago, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gide, 1858), 10:484–85.

67. Cited in Larry Schaaf, “Sir John Herschel’s 1839 Royal Society Paper on Photography,” History of Photography 3, no. 1 (January 1979): 57–58. John Herschel submitted “Note of the Art of Photography, or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Representation” to the Royal Society in March 1839 but quickly withdrew it out of deference for Talbot (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 4 [1837–43]: 131–33). It was thought lost until Larry Schaaf located it in 1979 in St John’s College Library, where I consulted it.

68. J. F. H. Herschel, “John Herschel à François Arago 1839,” Correspondance classée, X2(H5), Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire de Paris. See François Arago, “William Herschel,” in Oeuvres completes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gide et Baudry, 1855).

69. Berthollet, “Extraits de la Bibliothèque Britannique,” Annales de chimie 45 (1802): 256. “An Account of a method, etc. Description of a process for copying paintings on glass, and make silhouettes through the action of light on silver nitrate, by T. Wedgwood.” Berthollet comments: “White skin on which the silver solution is spread is more apt than paper to receive the impression of light which produces variegated hues all the way to black depending on the intensity of its transmission: blue rays exert the strongest action.” C. L. Berthollet, Essai de statique chimique (Paris: Didot, 1803), 1:204–5.

70. The table of contents of Annales de chimie (Paris: Bernard, 1807), 333, reads: “Wedgwood. Description of a process for making silhouettes through the action of light on silver nitrate.” Bulletin des sciences, Société philomatique 3 (Paris: J. Klostermann, 1811), 167: “Action of light on silver nitrate, by T. Wedgwood” (excerpt from Nicholson’s Journal, November 1802) signed “I. B” (Jean-Baptiste Biot), originally published in Bulletin des sciences 69 (1802). William Henry, Élémens de chimie expérimentale, trans. H. F. Gaultier-Claubry (Paris: Magimel, 1812), 2, 46: “This process was described by M. T. Wedgwood in Nicholson’s Journal, in-8, III, 167.”

71. “Système de chimie, de M. Th. Thomson, Translated by M. Riffault, Preceded by an Introduction by M. C. L. Berthollet,” Annales de chimie 69 (1809): 100–12.

72. Étienne Bérard, “Mémoire sur le muriate d’argent,” Annales de chimie 68 (1808): 78–87.

73. [Étienne-Louis Malus], “Le Traité des couleurs de Goethe,” Annales de chimie 79 (1811): 199–219; William Alschuler, “Color Theory and Practice 1800–1860,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 316; Keld Nielsen, “Another Kind of Light: The Work of T. J. Seebeck and His Collaboration with Goethe,” part 1, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20, no. 1 (1989): 146–47.

74. Berthollet, Chaptal, and Biot, “Rapport sur un mémoire de M. Bérard, relatif aux propriétés physiques et chimiques des divers rayons qui composent la lumière solaire,” Annales de chimie 85 (1813): 309–25.

75. J. E. Bérard, “Mémoire sur les propriétés des différentes espèces de rayons qu’on peut séparer au moyen du prisme de la lumière solaire,” Mémoires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil 3 (1817): 43.

76. Larry John Schaaf, Tracings of Light: Sir John Herschel and the Camera Lucida (London: Friends of Photography, 1989), 31.

77. Thomas Thomson, Éléments de chimie (Paris: Bernard, 1809), 8:262–70.

78. Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 9–11. Correspondence shows his efforts at professionalization. See, for example, Franz Xaver von Zach to William Henry Fox Talbot, June 29, 1822, WCT 988, available at Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, accessed June 12, 2025, https://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters. A recent collection on Talbot’s nonphotographic pursuits omits astronomy altogether (Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam, eds., William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013]).

79. William Henry Fox Talbot, Notebook ‘A’, 1817–1844, Add MS 88942/1/183, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, UK.

80. William Henry Fox Talbot, Notebook ‘B’, 1822–1824, Add MS 88942/1/184, 94, 103, 112–13, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, UK.

81. William Henry Fox Talbot, Notebook ‘C’, 1825, Add MS 88942/1/185, 15–35, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, UK.

82. William Henry Fox Talbot, Notebook ‘C’, 1825, Add MS 88942/1/185, 19 (dated between March 22 and 29, 1825), Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, UK.

83. John Herschel to William Henry Fox Talbot, November 1, 1827, Letter ID 8807, available at Adler Planetarium Calendar of the Correspondence of Sir John Herschel Database, accessed June 12, 2025, http://historydb.adlerplanetarium.org/herschel.

84. John Herschel, “Light,” Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, ed. Edward Smedley (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1830), 2:582; J.-F.-W. Herschel, Traité de la lumière, trans. P.-F. Verhulst and Adolphe Quételet (Paris: De Malher, 1829), 328.

85. Dozens of letters between John Herschel and Talbot in 1826–1827 include topics such as light absorption, spectra, light bands, refraction, Fraunhofer, telescopes, microscopes, and astronomy.

86. William Henry Fox Talbot, pocket notebook (1829–1830), Add MS 88942/5/1/12, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, UK.

87. Christine Blondel, “Electrical Instruments in 19th Century France, Between Makers and Users,” History and Technology 13 (1997): 157–82.

88. John Herschel considered the Lerebours dioptric telescope at the Observatoire de Paris to be on par with Fraunhofer’s Dorpat telescope. Bibliothèque universelle des sciences, belles-lettres et arts 30 (Genève: Bibliothèque universelle, 1825), 447.

89. [Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette], “Rapport fait par M. Hachette sur un microscope composé à objectif achromatique présenté par M. Vincent Chevalier,” Bulletin de la société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale 254 (August 1825): 239–42.

90. Paolo Brenni, “19th-Century French Instrument Makers: XIII: Soleil, Dubosq, and Their Successors,” Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 51 (1996): 7–16.

91. For instance, the catalog of the Utzschneider and Fraunhofer firms in Astronomische Nachtrichten in 1829. Paolo Brenni, “19th-Century Scientific Instrument Advertising,” Nuncius 17, no. 2 (2002): 499.

92. An 1839 account of Froment’s photographs mentions “various drawings obtained by the action of light. These drawings are fixed on paper treated with silver nitrate and represent samples of gauze, muslin and other fabrics, tree leaves, etc. . . . Last year, in Manchester, the Academy of Sciences of this city invited him to one of its sessions, where his experiments were compared advantageously to those of M. Talbot. . . . M. Bourcier declares that M. Froment does not know the Daguerre process, only shared with M. Arago and not the public. . . . He can make numberless prints without fearing any alterations. He continues his research begun three years ago at Polytechnique. . . . Right now, he is seeking to render leaves with their green tint and hopes to succeed. He has obtained indoor views, views of landscapes with shadows and natural perspective, of statues, busts, and buildings reproduced in the camera obscura” (Bottex and Lecoq, “Séance du 14 juin,” in Annales des sciences physiques et naturelles, d’agriculture et d’industrie, publiées par la Société royale d’agriculture, etc. de Lyon [Lyon, France: Barret, 1839], 2:276–77). This raises important questions. Did Froment present his work with Talbot’s in 1836 in Manchester? Was photographic research conducted at École Polytechnique under the aegis of Arago? Another source confirms that Froment presented his photographs “without a camera obscura” at the Société philosophique de Manchester in January 1839 (“Froment [Gustave],” Biographie nationale des contemporains, ed. Ernest Glaeser [Paris: Glaeser, 1878], 270).

93. Aimé Laussédat, Notice biographique sur Gustave Froment (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1865), 10.

94. Arthur Chevalier, Étude sur la vie et les travaux scientifiques de Charles Chevalier (Paris: Bonaventure et Ducessois, 1862), 15.

1. Charles Chevalier, Guide du photographe (Paris: Charles Chevalier, 1854), 3:19. The statement is dated to “the first days of the year 1826” by his son Arthur Chevalier, Étude sur la vie et les travaux scientifiques de Charles Chevalier (Paris: Bonaventure et Ducessois, 1862), 19; Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 49. An erroneous (back-translated) French quote with the wrong date (1839) and source (“letter”) figures as an epigraph in Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport, Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013). The misquote originates with Éric Michaud, “Daguerre, un Prométhée chrétien,” Études photographiques 2 (1997): 1.

2. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 76. See introduction.

3. Lawrence Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4. The French nègre was occasionally used since the eighteenth century for ghostwriter, but the usage was enthroned in 1845 by Eugène de Mirecourt, who made numerous racist statements about best-selling mixed-race novelist Alexandre Dumas. Dumas sued him and won. See Edmund Birch, “Alexandre Dumas’s Odyssey: Race, Slavery, Narrative,” PMLA 137, no. 5 (2022): 809–23.

5. Franco-Brazilian experimenter Hercules Florence coined the term for his photocopy process in 1832–1834 (photographia/la photographie). Two commentators from Edinburgh (Andrew Fyfe and John Robison) did so independently in 1839 about Talbot’s and Daguerre’s processes (Oxford English Dictionary, under “photography,” updated July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3795670947). John Herschel used photography first in his unpublished 1839 draft titled “Note on the Art of Photography, or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Representation” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 4, no. 37 [1839]: 132–33), then in “On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and Other Substances, Both Metallic and Non-Metallic, and on Some Photographic Processes” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 130 [1840]: 1–59).

6. For Lorenz Oken, see chapter 3. “Photography [photographie]: part of natural history dealing with light” (François Raymond, Supplément au dictionnaire de l’Académie française [Paris: Gustave Barba, 1836], 619), with similar entries in other 1830s dictionaries.

7. Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, trans. Edward Epstean (1932; New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 259.

8. Wilhelm Beer and Johannes Heinrich Mädler, Mappa Selenographica (Berlin: S. Schropp, 1834).

9. R. B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood: The First Photographer (London: Duckworth, 1903), 21.

10. Eugène Hubert, “M. Daguerre, the Camera Obscura, and the Drawings That Make Themselves,” in First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography, ed. Steffen Siegel (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), 26–27 (translation amended).

11. Stephen Pinson, “Daguerre, expérimentateur du visuel,” Etudes photographiques 13 (July 2003): 110–35; Léopold Chandezon and Jean-Guillaume-Antoine Cuvelier, Les Machabées, ou la prise de Jérusalem [Maccabees, or the taking of Jerusalem] (Paris: Delaguette, 1817).

12. D. Sulik, A. Kaplan, and H. Khanjian, “The First Scientific Investigation of Niépce’s Images from UK and US Collections: Image Layer and Image Formation,” Imaging Science Journal 61 (2012): 626n1.

13. François Arago, “Fixation des images qui se forment au foyer d’une chambre obscure,” Compte rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 8 (January–June 1839): 6; François Arago, Oeuvres complètes, ed. M. J.-A. Barral, 13 vols. (Paris: Gide, 1854–1862), 7:456.

14. L. M. Dougherty and A. Dollfus, “F. D. Arago’s Polarimeter and His Original Observation of Extraterrestrial Polarisation in 1811,” Journal of the British Astronomy Association 99, no. 4 (1989): 185.

15. Arago, Oeuvres complètes, 8:73–74.

16. Tanya Sheehan, Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 1 (see also 2, 15, 25–26).

17. Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 27.

18. Niépce cited in [Louis-Mandé] Daguerre, Historique et description des procédés du Daguerréotype et du Diorama (Paris: Susse Frères/Lerebours, 1839), 39.

19. Steffen Siegel, ed., First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), 167.

20. Arago, Oeuvres complètes, 7:457, 467.

21. J. F. W. Herschel, diary entry for February 14, 1839, Manuscript Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, quoted in Mike Ware, “Luminescence and the Invention of Photography,” History of Photography 16, no. 1 (2002): 15n53.

22. Le Baron de Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, ex-colon français, adressée à M. J. C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi, sur les Noirs et les Blancs, la Civilisation de l’Afrique, le Royaume d’Hayti, etc. (Au Cap-Henry, Haiti: P. Roux, 1816), 31–32; Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites, trans. W. H. M. B. (London: Hatchard, 1817).

23. See Marlene L. Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

24. Le Baron de Vastey, Le Système colonial dévoilé (Au Cap-Henry, Haiti: P. Roux, 1814), 32.

25. Joseph von Fraunhofer, VIII. Bestimmung des Brechungs- und Farbenzerstreuungs-Vermögens verschiedener Glasarten, in Bezug auf die Vervollkommnung achromatischer Fernröhre (München, Germany: n.p., 1817). In the 1860s, these absorption bands were understood to index the chemical composition of light sources.

26. See Jean-Michel Racault, “La Cosmologie poétique des Harmonies de la Nature,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de France 89, no. 5 (1989): 825–42.

27. Jacques-Bernardin-Henri de Saint-Pierre, Harmonies de la nature, 3 vols. (Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1815), 3:407–612.

28. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Empsael et Zoraïde, ou les Blancs esclaves des Noirs au Maroc (Caen, France: Louis Jouan, 1905), 3. This edition is preferable to the flawed first publication mentioned above.

29. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

30. See Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 10, 40–41, 84–85.

31. William N. Griggs, The Celebrated “Moon Story” (New York: Bunnell and Price, 1852), 42.

32. Cited in Lynda Walsh, Sins Against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 66.

33. Matthew Goodman mentions a parallel P. T. Barnum exhibition of an African American woman named Joice Heth who was born into slavery and claimed to be 160 years old (Sun and the Moon, 9–10, 251–64).

34. Quoted in Louis P. Masur, 1831 Year of the Eclipse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 32.

35. Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (Baltimore, MD: Lucas & Deaver, 1831), 11.

36. Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

37. Linda K. Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834,” New York History 48, no. 1 (1967): 28–39. Anti-Black riots also took place in Philadelphia in August 1834.

38. William N. Griggs, The Celebrated “Moon Story” (New York: Bunnell and Price, 1852).

39. Novelist Honoré de Balzac, a friend of Arago, debunked the story, pointing out that Locke’s “megascope” was nonsensical since the lamp drowns the image, leaving on the screen but “a uniform and very intense lighting.” Honoré de Balzac, “Des Découvertes faites dans la lune et attribuées à Herschell fils,” and “Réponse aux auteurs des découvertes dans la lune faussement attribuéees à Sir John Herschell fils,” in Oeuvres completes, vol. 22 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1886), 255–59.

40. Illustrations from Leopoldo Galluzzo, Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel (Napoli, Italy: L. Gatti e Dura, 1836).

41. Both John and William Herschel believed in extraterrestrial life. Steven Ruskin, John Herschel’s Cape Voyage (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 94–95.

42. Elizabeth Green Musselman, “Swords into Ploughshares: John Herschel’s Progressive View of Astronomical and Imperial Governance,” British Society for the History of Science 31, no. 4 (1998): 424–25.

43. For the pro-Native sentiments of John and his wife Margaret, see Ruskin, John Herschel’s Cape Voyage, 52–57.

44. Henry Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, vol. 1 (New York: Harper Bros., 1871), 59.

45. Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 23–24.

46. John Stewart, “Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Annals of Science 77, no. 2 (2020): 155–68.

47. Henry Brougham, “Experiments and Observations on the Inflection, Reflection, and Colours of Light,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 86 (1796): 227–77; Henry Brougham “Further Experiments and Observations on the Affections and Properties of Light,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 87 (1797): 352–85.

48. Henry Brougham, “Further Experiments and Observations on the Properties of Light,” Abstracts of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London 6 (1850–1854): 312–19.

49. Papers of Charles Blagden, CB/1/2/193 and 195, Royal Society Library, London, UK.

50. See Thomas Young, “Reply to the Edinburgh Reviewers,” in Miscellaneous Works, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1855).

51. Henry Brougham, An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: E. Balfour et al., 1803), 2:412.

52. Monroe H. Freedman, “Henry Lord Brougham: Advocating at the Edge for Human Rights,” Hofstra Law Review 36 (2007): 311–21.

53. W. Lewis Hyde, “John William Draper 1811–1882, Photographic Scientist,” Applied Optics 15, no. 7 (1976): 1727.

54. John William Draper, “Early Contributions to Spectrum Photography and Photo-Chemistry,” Nature 10, nos. 243–44 (July 30, 1874): 243–44.

55. William John Draper, “Experiments on Solar Light,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 24, no. 1 (July 1837): 46.

56. Draper used a beam going through a small hole in a plate turned at an acute angle, so it produced diffraction at both sides of the hole.

57. See John William Draper, A Treatise on the Forces Which Produce the Organization of Plants, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Bros., 1845), 137–60; K. Hentschel, “Why Not One More Imponderable? John William Draper’s Tithonic Rays,” Foundations of Chemistry 4 (2002): 5–59.

58. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 276.

59. See Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 3–5.

60. Though not much is known of the Arago sisters, James Lequeux insists that Marguerite, who married astronomer Claude-Louis Mathieu, and their daughter Lucie exerted a strong political influence on the brothers. James Lequeux, François Arago, un savant généreux: Physique et astronomie au XIXè siècle (Paris: EDP Sciences, 2008), 32.

61. See François Sarda, Les Arago: François et les autres (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), 241–55.

62. É. Arago et al., Paris dans la comète (Paris: Donday-Dupré, 1836), 12.

63. Jacques Arago, Promenade autour du monde (Paris: Leblanc, 1822); Jacques Arago, Narrative of a Voyage Around the World (London: Treuttel and Wurtz, 1823).

64. For a recent assessment of Jacques Arago’s Romantic exoticism, see Peter Brown, “Jacques Arago: The Artist as Social Scientist in a World in Transition,” Great Circle 39, no. 2 (2017): 120–48.

65. Cited in Benjamin Fagan, “The North Star and the Atlantic 1848,” African American Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 56.

66. Frederick Douglass, “Colored Newspapers,” North Star, January 1848, 1, Frederick Douglass Papers: Speech, Article, and Book File, 1846–1894, mss11879, box 21, reel 13, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.21015.

67. See Maurice O. Wallace et al., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

68. Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 452–53.

69. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form,’” Critical Inquiry 42 (2015): 31–60.

70. Ginger Hill, “‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” in Wallace et al., Pictures and Progress, 42–45.

1. Henri Langlois relied on exhibitions centered on Marey in 1948, 1963, and 1966 to secure state financing for the Cinémathèque Française as a key national cultural institution. This entailed aesthetically elevating Marey’s black-and-white shorts: “Nothing is more secret, more lyrical, more explosive, more contemporary than the silence of his blacks and the lightness of his whites,” Langlois declared, opening the 1963 event. Langlois quoted in Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la cinémathèque française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 327fn232 (my translation). See also Henri Langlois, E. J. Marey, sa vie, son oeuvre (Beaune, France: Les Amis de Marey, 1974), with a section titled “Marey: Precursor of 20th-century Art,” 19–20.

2. See, for instance, Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); François Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta and Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992); Francesco Casetti, The Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

3. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xviii.

4. Jacques Besson’s richly illustrated Theatrum Instrumentorum et Machinarum (1569) was the model. See Mark Andrews, The Science and Engineering of Materials: Theater of Machine Books, 1472–1800 (Toronto: AE Publications, 2023).

5. Hebbel E. Hoff and L. A. Geddes conjecture that both friction and insufficient practical application sidelined these specimens. “The Beginnings of Graphic Recording,” Isis 53, no. 3 (1962): 287–324.

6. Jean-Dominique Augarde, “The Scientific Cabinet of Comte d’Ons-en-Bray and a Clock by Domenico Cucci,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 8 (2003): 80–95.

7. H. E. Hoff, L. A. Geddes, and Roger Guillemin, “The Anemograph of Ons-en-Bray: An Early Self-Registering Predecessor of the Kymograph,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 12, no. 10 (1957): 424–48.

8. James Dewey and Perry Byerly, “The Early History of Seismometry,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 59, no. 1 (1969): 183–227.

9. Alexander Keith, “Descriptions of a Thermometer Which Marks the Greatest Degrees of Heat and Cold, from One Time of Observation to Another, and May Also Register Its Own Height at Every Instant,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 4 (1798 [1795]): 211.

10. The revival of self-tracing devices is often attributed to John Southern, an employee of the firm Boulton & Watt, who, in 1796, modified a pantograph with a weight-driven synchronized horizontal mechanism, affixing an inked stylus to a steam piston to register on a sheet of paper a closed loop, representing one continuous cycle of steam pressure variation. Southern was likely influenced by Keith. See Klaus Hentschel, Visual Cultures in Science and Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 180–84.

11. Thomas Young, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, 2 vols. (London: Joseph Johnson, 1807), 190–91.

12. Emmanuel Breguet, “Who Was Abraham-Louis Breguet?,” in Breguet: Art and Innovation in Watchmaking, ed. Emmanuel Breguet and Martin Chapman (New York: Prestel, 2015).

13. Registre des séances du Bureau des longitudes pour les années 1810–1830, Ms. 1060, s.v. 29 Sept. 1813 and 3 Feb. 1819, Archives de l’Observatoire de Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire de Paris, Paris Observatory, Paris, France.

14. Louis Moinet, Nouveau traité général, élémentaire, pratique et théorique d’horlogerie pour les usages civils et astronomiques, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Paris: Dutertre, 1853).

15. [Étienne-Jules] Marey, “V. Des Appareils Enregistreurs (Histoire naturelle des corps organisés),” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger 4 (1867): 567fn1.

16. Eytelwein’s device used “the tip of a stylus pushing against a paper strip rolled around two vertical-axis cylinders” (Hippolyte Sonnet, Dictionnaire des mathématiques appliquées [Paris: Lahure, 1867], 469). H. E. Hoff and L. A. Geddes point out that the decisive steps took place in Paris at École Polytechnique and Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in the 1830s and 1840s (“Graphic Registration Before Ludwig: The Antecedents of the Kymograph,” Isis 50, no. 1 [1959]: 5–21).

17. Arthur Morin, Nouvelles Expériences sur le frottement (Paris: Bachelier, 1834), 2:73. A report on Morin’s experiments in the Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences is signed by Arago.

18. [Étienne-Jules] Marey, “Production du movement chez les animaux,” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger 14 (March 2, 1867): 213; [Étienne-Jules] Marey, “Du Mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie,” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger 10 (February 3, 1866): 174.

19. Charles Wheatstone, “Notes sur le chronoscope électromagnétique,” in The Scientific Papers of Sir Charles Wheatstone (London: Taylor and Francis, 1879).

20. For setup versus machine, see Henning Schmidgen, “Physics, Ballistics, and Psychology: A History of the Chronoscope in/as Context, 1845–1890,” History of Psychology 8, no. 1 (2005): 46–78.

21. C. C. Adley, “The Electric Telegraph,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 9 (1852): 326.

22. Adolphe Quételet, “Expériences de M. Wheatstone,” Compte-rendus de l’Académie de Bruxelles 7 (October 17, 1840): 131–32.

23. L’Abbé Moigno, Traité de télégraphie électrique (Paris: Franck, 1849), 88.

24. John F. Herschel, “On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and Other Substances, Both Metallic and Non-Metallic, and on Some Photographic Processes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 130 (1840): 46, 50. John Herschel devised an actinometer in 1824, which he used until 1839 (Adelheid Voskuhl, “Recreating Herschel’s Actinometry: An Essay in the Historiography of Experimental Practice,” British Journal for the History of Science 30, no. 3 [1997]: 350). He was a central actor in spectroscopy in the 1830s with John William Draper and David Brewster (M. A. Sutton, “Sir John Herschel and the Development of Spectroscopy in Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science 7, no. 1 [1974]: 42–60).

25. See Thomas L. Hankins, “A ‘Large and Graceful Sinuosity,’” Isis 97, no. 4 (2006): 605–33.

26. Britt Salvesen, “Charles Wheatstone,” in Encyclopedia of 19th-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1492–93.

27. O. J. R. Howarth, The British Association for the Advancement of Science: A Retrospect 1831–1921 (London: BAAS, 1922), 158.

28. For an extensive list of chronoscope-chronograph applications, see P.-A. Daguin, Traité élementaire de physique, vol. 3 (Toulouse, France: Privat, 1855), 251–64. For the history of the drum kymograph for physiology research by Carl F. W. Ludwig, see Merriley Borell, “Instrumentation and the Rise of Modern Physiology,” Science & Technology Studies 5, no. 2 (1987): 53–62.

29. Edward S. Holden, Memorial of William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond (San Francisco: Murdoch and Co., 1897), 250.

30. See Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2003), 101–7. The expression came from royal astronomer George Biddell Airy in England (J. A. Bennett, “George Biddell Airy and Horology,” Annals of Science 37, no. 3 [1980]: 269–85). Jimena Canales explains why, in the words of an 1857 commentator, “astronomers” pioneered “the ways of measuring thoughts.” She shows that astronomer Adolphe Hirsch was instrumental in developing chronographic and telegraphic methods for the transnational astronomical synchronization of timekeeping (“Exit the Frog, Enter the Human: Physiology and Experimental Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 2 [2001]: 186).

31. John Herschel, “Instantaneous Photography,” Photographic News 4, no. 88 (May 11, 1860): 13. The Bulletin de la Société Française de photographie and The Photographic News translated each other’s noteworthy news items throughout the 1860s. Pierre-Hubert Desvignes patented in France a direct application of Herschel’s idea: “The views being placed in the said cylinder, and the cylinder being caused to rotate, will show to the eye the steam engine as if in motion” (“Scientific Gossip,” Photographic News 4, no. 109 [October 5, 1860]: 269).

32. Étienne-Jules Marey, “Recherches sur le pouls,” Comptes rendus des séances de la société de biologie 1, no. 3 (1860): 281–309.

33. See Nicholas Wade and Josef Brozek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elbaum Associates, 2001).

34. Quetelet knew Herschelian cosmology very well and was a personal friend of John Herschel. Adolphe Quételet, Astronomie élémentaire (Paris: De Malher, 1826), 66–67; H. Elkhadem, “La Correspondance d’Adolphe Quételet avec sir John Herschel: Un exemple de la richesse du fond Quételet,” in Adolphe Quételet 1796–1874, Hommages et contributions (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1975).

35. Joseph Plateau, Dissertation sur quelques propriétés des impressions produites par la lumière sur l’organe de la vue (Liège, Belgium: Dessain, 1831), 5 (unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own).

36. J[oseph] Plateau, Essai d’une théorie générale comprenant des apparences visuelles qui succèdent à la contemplation des objets colorés et de celles qui accompagnent cette contemplation: C’est-à-dire la persistance des impressions de la rétine, les couleurs accidentelles, l’irradiation, les effets de la juxtaposition des couleurs, les ombres colorées, etc. [Essay of a general theory including visual appearances that follow the contemplation of colored objects and of those that accompany this contemplation, that is, the persistence of impressions of the retina, accidental colors, irradiation, effects from juxtaposed colors, colored shadows, etc.] (Brussels: Hayez, 1834), 3–4. The dissertation is included as the second part of the essay. (Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.)

37. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 70. For a critique of Crary on that point, see Brooke Belisle, “The Dimensional Image: Overlaps in Stereoscopic, Cinematic, and Digital Depth,” Film Criticism 37, no. 3/1 (2013): 117–37; Jens Schröter, 3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplanar Image, trans. Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnystky (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 4–27.

38. Nicholas J. Wade and Benjamin W. Tatler, eds., The Moving Tablet of the Eye: The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 177–78.

39. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: Exeter University Press, 2000), 206–7.

40. Nicholas Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 195–97.

41. Michael Faraday, “On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions,” Journal of the Royal Institution 1 (1831): 210.

42. C[harles]. W[heatstone]., “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, 1,” Journal of the Royal Institution 1 (1831): 101.

43. Adolphe Quételet, Notes extraites d’un voyage en Angleterre (n.p., 1833), 8–9.

44. Chitra Ramalingam, “Fixing Transience: Photography and Other Images of Time in 1830s London,” in Time and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2018), 4.

45. Beverley F. Ronalds, Sir Francis Ronalds: Father of the Electric Telegraph (London: Imperial College Press, 2016), 57.

46. Beverley F. Ronalds, “The Beginnings of Continuous Scientific Recording Using Photography: Sir Francis Ronalds’ Contribution,” European Society for the History of Photography (2016): 2, http://www.eshph.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ronalds_camera.pdf.

47. See Larry Schaaf, “Henry Collen and the Treaty of Nanking,” History of Photography 6, no. 4 (1982): 353–66.

48. Francis Ronalds, “On Photographic Self-Registering Meteorological and Magnetic Instruments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 137 (1847): 111–17.

49. Charles Brooke, “On the Automatic Registration of Magnetometers, and Other Meterological Instruments, by Photography,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 137 (1847): 59–68. See also Isabel Marília Peres et al., “The Photographic Self-Recording of Natural Phenomena in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the ESHS, ed. A. Roca-Rosell (Barcelona: Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica, 2012).

50. For the duplicity of astronomer Airy trying to dissuade Ronalds from using photographic self-registration while supporting Brooke at Greenwich, while John Herschel and Edward Sabine, who ran the British Association for the Advancement of Science and financed Kew, sided with Ronalds, see Ronalds, Sir Francis Ronalds, 483–93.

51. Étienne-Jules Marey, “Inscription photographique des indications de l’électromètre de Lippmann,” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences 83, no. 4 (1876): 278–80.

52. Étienne-Jules Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie (Paris: Masson, 1884).

53. Henri Zuber, “Une Expédition en Corée,” Le Tour du monde 25 (1873): 407.

54. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

55. John McAleer, “‘Stargazers at the World’s End’: Telescopes, Observatories and ‘Views’ of Empire in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire,” British Journal for the History of Science 46, no. 3 (2013): 389–413.

56. Enfantin, Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, vols. 13–16 (Paris: Dentu, 1867–1868), 16:49–50.

57. Henri de Saint-Simon, Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du dix-neuvième siècle (n.p., 1808), 1:94–95.

58. Henri de Saint-Simon, Oeuvres choisies de C.-H. de Saint-Simon (Brussels: Van Meenen and Co., 1859), 1:xxi, 290–96.

59. Robert Chambers, Vestige of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), 296, 309.

60. In his best-selling 1830 Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher, Humphry Davy sketches an Oculus-like perspective on world history from astronomy, asserting the “superiority” of the “Caucasian stock” over “the negro or flat-nosed race” that would require “a hundred generations, successively improved” to reach the level of the Greeks. Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher (London: John Murray, 1830), 38–39.

61. John William Draper, Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical: or, The Conditions and Course of the Life of Man (New York: Harper’s and Brothers, 1856), v.

62. John William Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863).

63. See Adam Dewbury, “The American School and Scientific Racism in Early American Anthropology,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 3 (2007): 121–47.

64. William John Draper, Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America (New York: Harper’s and Brothers, 1865), 143–44, emphasis added.

65. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and exp. ed. (1981; New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

66. In Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical, Draper foregrounds optics at every turn: “In that phantasmagorical exhibition which we call history, events give birth to events as in dissolving views” (623), adding later, “He who has visited the dark Chamber of Baptista Porta, and seen with his own eyes the fairy but inverted landscapes . . . the magical spectres of things which the fingers could not grasp” can only hope that on these screens he will “find reflected all the future events of his life” appearing to him “now so little that the eye could scarcely discern their form, and now expanding to a gigantic stature and rushing forth” (633–34). A proponent of the “multiple worlds hypothesis,” Draper relativizes white supremacy from the eyes of “a stranger from another planet” who would undoubtedly conclude that “wherever we look man is the same” (569–70). That macroscopic scale dilutes his biases, leading him to recognize that “the old white inhabitants of Europe were not able to commence their civilization from their own interior resources, but were thrown in that career by the example and aid of a more southern and darker people” (634). Draper’s astronomical purviews on natural history whimsically dictate his opinions on the racial vectors of human history.

67. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 1.

68. Niles Eldridge, Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species from the Nineteenth-Century Through Punctuated Equlibria and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 8.

69. John Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman and Rees, 1833), 151.

70. Marey makes the same paradigmatic division between “static” and “dynamic” physiological research. “Du Mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie,” 170.

71. [Étienne-Jules] Marey, “Évolution historique des sciences (Histoire naturelle des corps organisés) (1),” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger 4 (1867): 257–61.

72. In 1855, Arthur de Gobineau published Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, propounding the Aryan origins of white Europeans. In 1863, Gustave Flourens, the son of Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, gave on behalf of his father a lecture series titled “The Natural History of Organized Bodies” where he echoed Gobineau’s unscientific racist theories. This may be why Marey steered clear of race. Gustave Flourens, “Histoire de l’homme,” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger 1 (1863): 46–48, and following installments in vol. 2.

73. Airy quoted in Holly Rothermel, “Images of the Sun: Warren De la Rue, George Biddell Airy and Celestial Photography,” British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 2 (1993): 137.

74. Christopher Ray Carter, Magnetic Fever: Global Imperialism and Empiricism in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009), xv, 97.

75. Alan Hirschfeld, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 61.

76. Aimé Laussedat, “Les Applications de la perspective au lever des plans—vues dessinées à la chambre claire—photographies,” Annales du conservatoire des arts et métiers, series 2 (Paris: Gauthiers-Villars, 1890), 2:2.

77. Expériences faites avec l’instrument à mesurer les bases appartenant à la commission de la carte d’Espagne, trans. from Spanish by A. Laussédat (Paris: Librairie militaire Dumaine, 1860), 3.

78. Notice sur les travaux scientifiques de M. Aimé Laussédat (Paris: Gauthiers-Villars, 1883), 11fn2.

79. Aimé Laussedat, Mémoire fondamental sur l’application de la chambre claire au lever des plans, Mémorial de l’officier du génie 16 (Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1854), 18–20.

80. E. Monet, Application de la photographie à la topographie (Paris: n.p, 1894), 25.

81. Warren De la Rue, The Bakerian Lecture on the Total Solar Eclipse of July 18th, 1860 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1862), 82.

82. A. Laussedat, La Lunette astronomique horizontale (Paris: E. Martinet, 1874), 4.

83. A. Laussedat et al., “Rapport sur l’observation de l’éclipse solaire du 18 juillet 1860,” Compte-rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences 51 (1860): 993.

84. Astronomer Arthur Eddington became famous for his total solar eclipse photographs in 1919, which experimentally proved Albert Einstein’s relativity theory through the “lensing” of starlight around the Sun. Eddington went to Príncipe Island in the Gulf of Guinea, an old way station for slaving ships to the Americas. He and his team were hosted by the owner of the island’s largest plantation, Jerónimo José Carneiro. In 1905–1906, the inhumane exploitation of Angolan workers on Príncipe and São Tomé islands was called “Modern Slavery” by activist Henry Woodd Nevinson and caused an international uproar and a boycott (Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906). Although the worst practices stopped after WWI, by the time of Eddington’s visit, Angolan workers were still working in near-enslavement conditions with high mortality rates. Accounts of the expedition make no mention of this context. Lowell J. Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

85. Bulletin de la Société française de photographie 22 (1876): 99.

1. St. Louis Post Dispatch, August 9, 1896, 4.

2. Camille Flammarion, “Lumen, récit d’outre-terre,” L’Artiste 11 (February 1, 1867): 163–84; “Lumen, les paradoxes de la science,” L’Artiste 13 (May 1, 1867): 163–78; “Lumen, les paradoxes de la science,” L’Artiste 14 (June 1, 1867): 338–50. Several passages and a fourth part were added to the collated novella in Camille Flammarion, Récits de l’infini (Paris: Didier, 1873), the text used in this chapter (unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own). Récits de l’infini includes two appended short stories: “History of a Comet” and “To Infinity.” That collection was how Lumen first appeared in English (Camille Flammarion, Stories of Infinity, trans. S. R. Crocker [Boston: Robert Brothers, 1873]).

3. Danielle Chaperon was the first to revive Lumen’s “cosmic cinema,” albeit outside the purview of media studies. Camille Flammarion, entre astronomie et littérature (Paris: Imago, 1998).

4. Camille Flammarion, Mémoires biographiques et philosophiques d’un astronome (Paris: Flammarion, 1911), 22–55.

5. See Philippe de la Cotardière, Camille Flammarion (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 46.

6. Lynn L. Sharp, Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

7. For an excellent treatment of astronomy and Flammarion in late nineteenth-century visual culture, see Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 199–244.

8. Victor Hugo, Proses philosophiques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937), 610.

9. See Helge S. Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008).

10. In Les Merveilles célestes, lectures du soir (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 241, Flammarion collates and edits (without attribution) three passages on comets from the fourth part of Les Posthumes, citing the same collated passage in Récits de l’infini (282fn1) (Restif de la Bretonne, Les Posthumes [Paris: Duchêne, 1802], 4:74–76). In Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (Paris: Didier, 1865), Flammarion mentions three other works by Restif: Les Hommes volants, Monsieur Nicolas, and La Découverte australe (173, 524–32).

11. Colin Montgomery et al., “Michell, Laplace and the Origin of the Black Hole Concept,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 12, no. 2 (2009): 90–96.

12. See Karl Clausberg, “A Microscope for Time: What Benjamin, Klages, Einstein and the Movies Owe to Distant Stars,” in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, ed. Tyrus Miller (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008). Karl Clausberg argues that Flammarion read Eberty’s The Stars and the Earth and advocates for Eberty’s prescience and influence. Clausberg suggests that Flammarion included a vignette of the Battle of Waterloo seen in backward motion in his 1873 version of Lumen after reading a similar episode in Richard A. Proctor’s 1870 book Other Worlds than Ours (itself also influenced by Eberty, according to Clausberg). However, the Waterloo episode figures already in the 1867 version of Lumen (“Lumen, les paradoxes de la science” [May 1, 1867], 175–76), so Flammarion is the source of Proctor, not the reverse. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (finished in 1832) and Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) also proposed waves of sound and light reaching infinity (see Chaperon, Camille Flammarion, 68–77). Eberty’s description of his “microscope of time” is nontechnical: “As the magnifying glass apparently enlarges a thousand times the space which a minute object occupies, and thus renders it possible to separate the small contiguous portions of which it consists . . . so [the observer] is able to follow the reflected images of the stages of a rapid development” (The Stars and the Earth: Thoughts upon Space, Time, and Infinity [London: H. Baillere, 1846], 2:12).

13. Benoît Turquety, Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History, trans. Timothy Barnard (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 107–18.

14. They were based on illustrations for the second edition (1867) of his book Les Merveilles célestes (1865). Flammarion indicates that the second edition replaced a number of long verse citations by illustrations as “the poetry of direct spectacle.” Camille Flammarion, Les Merveilles célestes, lectures du soir, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1867), i.

15. Camille Flammarion, “La Composition chimique des astres, révélée par l’analyse de leur lumière,” Le Siècle, January 12, 1866, 3.

16. Fulgence Marion [Camille Flammarion], L’Optique (Paris: Hachette, 1867). The Fantasmagorie of Robertson takes roughly a sixth of the entire book (209–63).

17. Several optical scientists and photographers, from Plateau in the late 1840s to Antoine-François-Jean Claudet in the 1850s, proposed stereoscopic disk photography combined with the phenakistoscope to produce short motion effects, notably John Herschel, “Instantaneous Photography,” Photographic News 4, no. 88 (May 11, 1860): 13. Ernest de Saint-Elme reported on Aimé Laussedat’s idea of a panoramic two-reel paper camera: “A strip of negative paper rolled around a dispensing cylinder placed on the side at the back of the apparatus is tensed from this cylinder to another which is the receptor on the other side. . . . We thus obtain a series of juxtaposed panoramic views on the same paper strip” (“Chronique photographique,” Cosmos 4, no. 2 [1866]: 40–41). See Caroline Chik, “La Photographie stéréoscopique animée, avant la chronophotographie,” Cinémas 25, no. 1 (2014): 133–56.

18. Camille Flammarion, L’Atmosphère: Description des grands phénomènes de la nature (Paris: Hachette, 1872), 283.

19. Camille Flammarion, “Eclipse de soleil du 22 décembre 1870,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences 71 (1870): 941–44.

20. The archivist of Flammarion’s Juvisy Observatory and I visited the holding room where Flammarion’s machines are stored, but we couldn’t locate the photometer.

21. Self-registering photographic setups for meteorology were reported already in the 1860s, notably simultaneous photographic measurements of magnetism between England and Portugal in 1867. See Isabel Marília Peres et al., “The Photographic Self-Recording of Natural Phenomena in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Circulation of Science and Technology, ed. A. Roca-Rosell (Barcelona: SCHCT-IES, 2010).

22. Félix Nadar, When I Was a Photographer, trans. Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 231.

23. “Jan Evangelista Purkyně,” Monoskop, last edited May 25, 2022, monoskop.org/Jan_Evangelista_Purkyně.

24. For enlarger-heliostat setups, see Désiré von Monckhosen, Photographic Optics (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1867).

25. Françoise Launay, The Astronomer Jules Janssen: A Globetrotter of Celestial Physics, trans. Storm Dunlop (New York: Springer, 2012), 182.

26. Helium was subsequently found in caves. Norman Lockyer’s wife and collaborator, Winifred Lockyer, translated one of Flammarion’s books into English. Camille Flammarion, The Wonders of the Heavens, trans. by Mrs. Norman Lockyer (New York: Scribner, 1871).

27. Françoise Launay and Peter D. Hingley, “Jules Janssen’s ‘Revolver Photographique’ and Its British Derivative, ‘the Janssen Slide,’” Journal for the History of Astronomy 31 (2005): 58.

28. For the intersection of the Venus transit, psychophysiology, and astronomers’ personal equations, see Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

29. Hervé Faye, “Sur l’observation photographique du passage de Vénus et sur un appareil de M. Laussédat,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences 70 (1870): 541–48. See Jimena Canales, “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France,” Isis 93, no. 4 (2002): 597fn24. Camille Flammarion singles out the Laussedat setup with a heliostat in Études et lectures sur l’astronomie (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1873), 4:48–51.

30. Richard Proctor, “On the Application of Photography as a Means of Determining the Solar Parallax from the Transit of Venus in 1874,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 30, no. 3 (January 1870): 62–67; Richard A. Proctor, Other Worlds than Ours: The Plurality of Worlds Studied Under the Light of Recent Scientific Researches (1870; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1872), xii.

31. Théodose du Moncel, “Rapport [. . .] sur les appareils électriques présentés par M. Deschiens,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement (July 1875): 333–49 [meeting of July 10, 1874].

32. Bulletin de la Société française de Photographie 7 (August 2, 1867): 201–2. See also Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838–1952 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 28.

33. Rédier accompanied Janssen in the 1868 mission to Japan. His father Antoine [Antonin] Rédier was a clockmaker brought to Paris by Arago (see “Antoine Rédier,” La Nature 1024 [January 14, 1893]: 107). Janssen’s motivation may have been proprietary: In 1862 he suggested a new spectroscope design that his instrument-maker Jean George Hofmann patented (Françoise Launay, The Astronomer Jules Janssen: A Globetrotter of Celestial Physics, trans. Storm Dunlop [New York: Springer, 2012], 22–23, 77), and the next year his stellar spectral analysis method was similarly snatched and patented by Pietro Angelo Secchi (Biman B. Nath, The Story of Helium and the Birth of Astrophysics [New York: Springer, 2012], 84–88).

34. See C. Wall-Romana, “Translation of Charles Cros, ‘Process for Recording and Reproducing Colors, Forms and Movement’ (1867) with an Introduction,” Early Popular Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2021): 53–66.

35. Charles Cros and Tristan Corbière, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 535.

36. Charles Cros, “Un Drame interastral,” La Renaissance littéraire et artistique 1, no. 18 (1872): 139–41. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

37. Another contributor of L’Artiste and very close friend of Cros was Auguste, comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. Shortly after Edison’s coinvention of the phonograph, Villiers extrapolated Cros’s tale into his Eve of the Future, which combines the phonograph, a cinema apparatus, and “plastic substances” into a full-fledged cyborg. Ana Oancea cites two short stories of Villiers on Edison from 1877 and 1878 as precursors to the installment version in 1880–1881 and the 1886 novel (“Edison’s Modern Legend in Villiers’ L’Ève future,” Nordlit 28 [2011]: 173–87).

38. Camille Flammarion, “Le Passage de Vénus, résultats des expéditions françaises,” La Nature 101 (1875): 356–58. When Janssen explained how he changed from Deschiens to Rédier, he indicated that rather than “alternative and sudden motions” he opted for a disk with a “continuous rotating motion” (Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences 59 [July 6, 1874]). While the Deschiens design had an electrical intermittent mechanism, the Rédier design used a softer clockwork with a Maltese cross—but it was of course not continuous at all.

39. In a 1893 patent, Léon Bouly, the inventor of the “cinématographe” (whose trade name the Lumière brothers bought from him), describes: “a reversible photographic and optical device enabling the automatic and continuous capture on any kind of sensitive surface of a series of analytical shots of a motion . . . and providing subsequently, directly or by projection, the synthesis of these motions.” Cited in Laurent Mannoni, Donata Presenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson, eds., Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture (Gemona, Italy: La Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995), 352.

40. “Patent Caveat,” QM001348; TAEM 116:191, 349–51, illustration is on 350, Thomas Edison Papers, available at www://edison.rutgers.edu.

41. In 1875, Edison mistook electromagnetic interference for a new force he called “etheric.” See Ian Wills, “Edison and Science: A Curious Result,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009): 157–66.

42. I will address these connections in a forthcoming essay.

43. See Wall-Romana, “Translation of Charles Cros.”

44. Anon., “The Phonograph, etc.: Mr. Edison at Home in Menlo Park,” Daily Evening Traveller, May 23, 1878, available at Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition, accessed June 20, 2025, https://edisondigital.rutgers.edu/document/MBSB10620. An unsigned article from The Boston Evening Transcript, “Edison’s Laboratory,” dated Thursday, May 23, 1878, mentions that “THE TELEPHONOSCOPE/To do for the ear what the telescope does for the eye, and upon somewhat similar principles (substituting waves of sound for waves of heat), was explained” (available at Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition, accessed June 20, 2025, https://edisondigital.rutgers.edu/document/SM029089a). Edison was feeding these lines to journalists. See Half-Hour Recreations in Popular Science: “The Telephonoscope / Is to the ear what the telescope is to the eye” (ed. Dana Estes [Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1879], 31).

45. Camille Flammarion, Uranie (Paris: C. Marpon and E. Flammarion, 1889).

46. Camille Flammarion, La Fin du monde (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1894).

47. Camille Flammarion, “Le Mouvement de rotation de la terre reproduit par le cinématographe,” Bulletin de la Société astronomique de France (January 1898): 34.

48. L. Reverchon, “Le Kosmokinétographe,” Cosmos 693 (May 7, 1898): 587–88.

49. Danielle Chaperon, “Le Cinématographe astronomique, Camille Flammarion: un parcours de 1864 à 1898,” 1895, Revue d’histoire du cinéma 18 (1995): 52–65.

50. “A Night Condensed into Two Minutes: Latest Details of How Camille Flammarion’s Cinematograph Photographs the Heavenly Bodies,” Los Angeles Herald, February 20, 1898, 17.

51. Camille Flammarion, Lumen, trans. A. A. M. and R. M., with portion of the last chapter written specially for the English edition (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1897), 220–21.

52. See Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine, trans. Christophe Wall-Romana (1947; Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014).

53. See John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

54. Janvier trained as a medical doctor in France and became a Haitian diplomat in England. His book A Black People Confronting White Peoples was published by Flammarion’s brother in 1883. Louis-Joseph Janvier, Un Peuple noir devant les peuples blancs (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883).

55. Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (Paris: Pichon, 1885), 12, 18. See Robert Bernasconi, “A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a Philosopher Against Racism,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos. 4–5 (2008): 367–83.

56. Susan Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” American Literary History 8, no. 1 (1996): 57–82.

57. Flammarion, Mondes imaginaires, 36, 555.

58. Flammarion’s text traffics in Orientalism, describing a young Ottoman woman accompanied by “a small kneeling black slave playing a string instrument” (Récits de l’infini, 197). Lumen states that “indeed, there is not so much distance as you presume between the mind of a negro and the mind of a brain of the Latin race” (159).

59. Camille Flammarion, Dieu dans la matière (Paris: Didier, 1869), 267.

60. In Starry Dreams (1888), recounting an interstellar journey where the narrator discovers new life-forms on celestial bodies, Flammarion critiques religion and politics as equally divisive and militaristic, berating German people for “being the slaves of military leaders, neither less nor more than those of a king of central Africa” (Rêves étoilés [Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1888], 128). In Mémoires, he denounces the antisemitism of his mother (24), but in the novel The End of the World, a money-grubbing press magnate is described as “an American Israelite” (Flammarion, La Fin du monde, 216). He also mentions “the German race” and “Greco-Latin races” in several works, refracting the political animosity of France and Prussia, but without any biological justification. Flammarion’s brother, two years after championing Janvier’s affirmation of the Black diaspora, published the antisemitic manifesto of the Third Republic: Édouard Drumont, La France juive, 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1885–1886).

1. Michel Foucault, “Discursive Formations,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1981); Shawn Michelle Smith, “Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida,” in At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

3. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 22, 145. See also Sybille Fisher, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 25–32.

4. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Achille Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Fred Moten, Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

6. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 20.

7. I called for Europe’s reparations as a prolegomenon to Europe’s unification. Christophe Wall-Romana, “Metaschuld, 1999, das Jahr der Unverjährbarkeit,” Lettre International 47, no. 4 (1999): 35–43.

8. Albert Vanloo, Eugène Leterrier, and Arnold Mortier, Le Voyage dans la Lune (Paris: Tresse, 1877), 53–54.

9. H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (London: George Newnes, 1901).

10. See Matthew Solomon, ed., Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2011).

11. White explorers on the Moon carry umbrellas in Offenbach’s operetta and in the novel of A. Ville d’Avray, Voyage dans la lune avant 1900 (Paris: Furne, Jouvet & Cie, 1892). In Wells’s novel, Selenites carry “terrestrial-looking umbrellas” (Wells, First Men in the Moon, 296). Umbrellas clearly stand for weaponry, disguising as a “civilizing mission” the military nature of conquest.

12. M. J. Charles-Roux, Exposition universelle 1900: Les colonies françaises (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 171, 174. Malagasy music was first recorded by the Société d’Anthropologie at the occasion of the fair, and several musicians stayed in Paris after the fair, including Raony Lalao, who studied at the Conservatoire National and brought Malagasy music to the attention of musicologists (J. Tiersot, “La Musique chez les nègres d’Afrique,” Encyclopédie de la musique [Paris: Delagrave, 1922], 3216).

13. In the revival of Moon travel narratives after the 1835 Great Moon Hoax, racial discourses are prominent, for instance in Louis Desnoyers, Robert-Robert (1843; Paris: L. Passard, 1853). White shipwreck survivors describe an accidental trip to the Moon in a balloon by a man afraid of people who “do not look like him . . . mainly negroes” (1:262). Lunarians are described as having “blue hair, red eyes, green skin, purple lips and black teeth” (2:25–26), the same color spectrum for Lunarians as Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone, ed. William Poole (1638; Toronto: Broadview, 2009), 100 (see chap. 1). The survivors land in Africa—tacitly equivalent to the Moon—where they are captured by cannibal “savages” before bringing peace among African tribes, justifying French colonization as peacekeeping (2:92–101, 145–47). They escape Africa in a ship smuggling enslaved peoples whose bondage condition is described graphically, including their murder by being thrown overboard when a British cutter takes pursuit (2:200–09). The narrative ends in Paris, with a pithy conclusion that “history looks like these magic lanterns whose lens have the property of enlarging objects immeasurably however small they may be to the naked eye” (2:295). In another Moon travel narrative, “lunar humanity displayed only a single race always subject to the same influences of temperature and environment,” by contrast with developmental gaps “on Earth between the refined scions of our European civilizations and the barbarous ruffians erring in the bush of central Africa or Australian deserts.” Lunar technics include telegraphic television (Pierre de Sélènes [A. Bétolaud de la Drable], Un Monde inconnu, deux ans sur la Lune [Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1896], 106, 119–20, 162–63).

14. Charleston [Sur un air de Charleston], dir. Jean Renoir, France, 1927.

15. Hudgins was a friend of Josephine Baker, who introduced the Charleston to France, based on African music and African American communal dancing. On Hudgins, see Anthea Kraut, “The Black Body as Object and Subject of Property,” in Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

16. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108–10.

17. [Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche], Giphantie (Paris: Durand, 1760).

18. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920).

19. See Laurent Mannoni and Ben Brewster, “The Phantasmagoria,” Film History 8, no. 4 (1996): 390–415. Robertson took lessons from Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles and adapted his megascope (see Françoise Levie, Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, la vie d’un fantasmagore [Brussels: Le Préambule, 1990], 27–52). Sited in a former convent and ossuary confiscated during the Revolution, Fantasmagorie shows inserted the traumas of the revolution within larger historical developments. Programs ranged from gory mythology to biblical and Koranic miracles, the witches of Macbeth, semierotic idylls, Egyptian scenes and walking skeletons, Gothic episodes (“The Bloody Nun”) and bloody dreams, vignettes from the Reign of Terror (“the head of Danton”), and evocations of Enlightenment heroes such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and Benjamin Franklin. News events were included, like the death of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and the fire of the Odeon Theater. The first lady of the day, Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, attended the first run (Levie, Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, 105–7, 291–99). My point is that the Fantasmagorie was a kinesthetic vision-machine and a history-machine all in one.

20. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 173.

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Princess Steel,” PMLA 130, no. 3 (2015): 819–29.

22. Du Bois took astronomy at Fisk University in 1887–1888, practicing on a “3-in. telescope,” studying “Trouvelot’s astronomical drawings.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 11–12.

23. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The American Negro at Paris,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 22, no. 5 (1900): 575–77. See Alexander G. Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 23–58.

24. Émile Picard, Exposition universelle international de 1900 à Paris, Rapports du Jury International (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1903), 2:145.

25. See David C. Wall, “Close-Up: Jordan Peele, the ‘Looking Trilogy,’” Black Camera 15, no. 1 (2023): 182–88.