Faber 1996 ISBN 0-571-17242-3
from an essay titled "Sliding Scales: Microphotography
and the Victorian Obsession with the Minuscule," by Marina Benjamin
(pages 99-122)
"John Benjamin Dancer is not a name to be reckoned with
in the annals of science. Reading the various
biographical notices written since his death in 1887, one
is struck with a certain sense of pathos; not even the
liberal sprinkling of well-meaning hyperbole endemic to
biographical memoirs of scientific societies can disguise
the salvage exercise. Here was a man who almost
discovered ozone, failed to patent a number of ingenious
optical and mechanical devices that might have made him a
fortune, improved other people's discoveries rather than
made his own, an optician who lost his sight and died
courting penury. In short, a man whose career was a
catalogue of near misses, bad management and consequential
blunders. (...)
"Dancer dabbled in the possibility of combining
microscopy with photography from the start. During a
lecture at the Mechanics Institute in Liverpool, before an
audience of 1,500 people, he made a Daguerreotype image of
a flea magnified to six inches in length. (...) It was
only with Scott Archer's development of the wet collodion
process in 1851 that he (((Dancer))) was able to produce
successful microphotographs, which by virtue of being
reproducible became commercially viable.
"Mounted on standard 3 X 1 glass slides,
microphotographs look deceptively like histological
preparations, that is, ultra-thin slivers of living
tissue, but when magnified 100 times, the inscrutable tiny
black dot glued in place is revealed to be an exquisite,
fine-grained reproduction of Raphael's Madonna or the
ruins of Tintern Abbey, not a delicate tranche of liver or
a cluster of blood platelets. (...)
"Their subjects ranged from portraits of the
great and good == eminent scientists, European royals,
political and military dignitaries, literati and
thespians; celebrated paintings; religious texts, like
the Lord's Prayer or the Sermon on the Mount; extracts
from Tennyson, Dickens, Milton, Byron and Pope; to views
from around the world (forerunners of the tourist
snapshot). (((Yes, you read this correctly == John
Benjamin Dancer made and sold text "content" to be
accessed through a home microscope.)))
"Dancer produced his first commercial slide in 1853
== a rather austere picture of electrician William
Sturgeon's memorial tablet. By 1873 he was advertising
nearly 300 microphotographs and by the end of his career
the grand total had risen to over 500. Precisely how he
manufactured his microscopic marvels remains a trade
secret, since he never ventured into print on the subject.
It is known that in experimental trials he used the eyes
of recently killed oxen as photographic lenses and that he
began the process with 4 X 5 inch collodion glass-plate
negatives, but beyond that it can only be assumed that his
method of reduction bore some similarity to that
publicized by George Shadbolt in 1857. At the time
Shadbolt was President of the Microscopical Society and
editor of the *Photographic Journal,* in whose pages a
priority dispute over the invention of microphotography
took place, Dancer winning the day.
"Almost as soon as Dancer perfected the mechanics
of reproduction, he began selling microphotographs as
novelty items. At a shilling a slide, and with decent
parlour microscopes to be had for a few pounds,
microphotographic entertainment was an economic method of
rational recreation. (...) In fact the market for
microphotographs was sufficiently sizeable to make it
profitable for Dancer to sell his slides to a number of
retailers of scientific instruments. (...)
"Sir David Brewster, who in the 1850s was
Professor of Physics at St Andrews, saw streams of
possibilities emanating from Dancer's invention. In an
article on the micrometer for the eighth edition of the
*Encyclopaedia Britannica,* he waxed futuristic on
Dancer's technique: 'Microscopic copies of dispatches and
valuable papers and plans might be transmitted by post,
and secrets might be placed in spaces not larger than a
full stop or a small blot of ink.' While his latter
reverie was to remain confined to the pages of spy novels,
the former was genuinely prophetic: Brewster took
examples of Dancer's work on his Continental tour in 1857
where they were seen by French photographer Prudent
Dagron, who in 1870 used the method to relay messages by
carrier pigeon between besieged Paris and Tours."
(((Microphotography -- from experimental 19th century
optical science, to parlour toy medium, to mass
communication media for France under siege. Dancer the
half-baked entrepreneur, to Brewster the teacher and pop
science writer, to Dagron the entrepreneur and spy. It's
a very satisfying story, but a large gap remains -- how
did the Confederate spies in Canada learn to create and
conceal microformed documents in the clothing of hired
British agents? == bruces)))