This Day in History: 1839-09-09

First glass plate photo is taken on this day by Sir John Herschel, a British mathematician, astronomer, chemist and inventor. Herschel was part of a scientific community that included other photographic pioneers — especially  Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot— who were corresponding about the chemistry of light-sensitive materials.  Daguerre had already developed the first practical photographic process in the early 1830s, but his daguerreotype  produced a single unique image on a tin plate that was hard to copy.  Talbot’s  paper process, developed in 1841, allowed unlimited copies but had the disadvantage of a grain pattern in the image.  It was Herschel’s glass plate process, which led to the wet collodion process in the early 1850s, that became the basis of late 19th and 20th century photography.