ABSTRACT
William Crookes is an example of a mainstream nineteenth-century scientist who also devoted all of his life to editing several journals, while at the same time pursuing an active research and writing career – and, indeed, many other activities. Crookes may well be exceptional in combining editing with a huge range of other activities; only Norman Lockyer, the founder-editor of Nature, approaches comparability. Crookes more or less fell into editing because he expected to follow a career as a photographic chemist after becoming interested in photography as a teenager. Daguerre’s invention of a method for making accurate and permanent illustrations in 1839 (the daguerreotype) and William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of a method of ‘photogenic drawing’ using chemically sensitized paper in the same year attracted an enormous amount of contemporary attention. By the end of 1841 Talbot had developed and patented a process whereby latent images captured on sensitive paper (the negative) could be developed into permanent positive prints using silver salts, gallic acid and other chemicals.2 Both methods of reproduction could be easily learned and experimented with by amateurs – provided they had sufficient wealth to pay for the necessary chemicals.3 Young Crookes was certainly in this position since, as we have seen, his father was a successful Regent Street tailor and property
investor. Moreover, by a happy accident, Joseph Crookes’ gentlemen’s outfitters was only a few doors away from number 122, the shop of the instrument maker John Newman, whose manager, Robert Murray, had a scientific and commercial interest in the new photography. Murray ensured that Newman’s shop became a centre for the supply of chemicals and photographic equipment before, in 1855, he set up his own philosophical and photographic instrument firm (Murray & Heath) in Jermyn Street. Murray became a good friend to young Crookes and encouraged his interest in the chemical processes that made photography possible.4 Crookes was a capable amateur photographer by 1848.
