One might be wrong. On the following pages, we offer two unusual reports of revolutionary developments in the field—one resuscitated from 19th-century oblivion, the other too futuristic to believe.
Sunrise is still an hour away on this short winter's day, but mike Robinson is already hard at work in the basement of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Steadying a velvet-faced wooden paddle on a work table, he rubs a small, silver-clad copper plate along the buffing surface again and again. His eye is on an electronic timer. Five minutes on the velvet buff, he says, then five minutes on the buckskin buff, repeat for half an hour, then another five minutes with iodine and bromine "sensitizing" boxes before three daguerreotype plates are camera-ready. I check my watch. It's going to be close.
Above us, on the fourth floor of the hospital, David B. Bernstein, chief resident in anesthesia and critical care, is getting ready for his first procedure of the day. He will induce a state of general anesthesia in a 43-year-old woman, after which surgeons will remove her gallbladder through a tiny incision in her abdomen, using endoscopic cameras and surgical instruments. If all goes well it should be an utterly routine procedure, except for one twist: In the far corner of the operating room, Mike Robinson will be making a daguerreotype of Bernstein inducing anesthesia.
The occasion is a scientific reunion of sorts, a meeting of two disciplines that were separated at birth long ago. On October 16, 1846, the world's first public operation under ether anesthesia was performed in this hospital, in a surgical theater known thereafter as the Ether Dome. It was an event to which we owe much of modern medicine. Before anesthesia, the best indicator of a surgeon's skill was speed (the Englishman James Syme was timed in 1834 amputating a leg at the hip in 90 seconds). After anesthesia, surgeons could operate for hours, and patients no longer had to be dead drunk or restrained by a straitjacket. Before anesthesia, surgery was dangerous and painful. After anesthesia it was just dangerous.
The discovery of ether was an international sensation. So within weeks of the first successful ether operation, Mass General, mindful of its historic role, hired the Boston firm of Southworth & Hawes to take a series of daguerreotypes. In the best-known plate, the camera looks down from the Ether Dome's steeply descending rows of seats into the stark, semicircular surgical pit. The patient, wearing only a cotton gown and wool socks, sprawls on the table unconscious, awaiting surgery on his leg. Physician John C. Warren and his colleagues are in street clothes—somber frock coats, florid satin vests. They wear no masks, no gloves, no surgical gowns, and have plenty of whiskers. Louis Pasteur is a dozen years from his first major discoveries about bacteria, and Joseph Lister nearly 20 years from his operations under sterile conditions. But in 1847 ether is a great leap forward, and these Boston doctors, holding as still as they can manage, know it.
Even as the doctors are giving birth to modern medicine, Southworth & Hawes are bringing into the world another definitive modern art: news photography. Their daguerreotypes weren't intended as commercial journalism (no American newspaper would directly reproduce a photograph until 1880), but this is one of the first uses of a camera to record an event in progress and not just a group portrait or a staged "photo op." The patient is ready. The cutting is about to begin. Dr. Warren steadies himself, his hands on the patient's leg. In the background a young surgical attendant in shirtsleeves stands by, ready to spring forward with the first scalpel.
Daguerreotype exposures were long, the mercury they required dangerous, and the plates fickle. Few daguerreotypists felt confident enough to work outside their studios without control over light, chemistry, and most of all, their subjects. How did Southworth & Hawes do it? Until recently such questions were best left to daguerreotype collectors, photohistorians, and a handful of others with a taste for the antiquated. Then in 1990, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, organized its first daguerreotype workshop. The Internet spread the news (ironically, daguerreotypes make great JPEG files: A backlit monitor simulates the effect of light scattering off the plate's silver background), and a very small revival began. Today there are even a handful of professional daguerreotypists.
Mike Robinson is one of the most adventurous, which is why he is handbuffing his plates in the basement of Mass General this morning. Robinson has made more than a thousand "dags" since taking a 1997 Eastman House workshop. He has perfected his art by trial, error, and creative scrounging. He doesn't have much choice. Although he would love to nip down to a local camera shop for some sensitizing compounds, no one stocks Gurney's American Sensitive anymore. Finally his beeper sounds. The last plate passes muster under a raking light. Robinson moves to a darkroom where he has parked his two sensitizing boxes. Their tops are sliders. Robinson latches a plate into the holder and, sliding it forward to expose the buffed metal to the tiny iodide flakes inside, starts counting under his breath. At room temperature iodine sublimates out of the flakes, rising in a vapor that reacts with the pure silver on the plate, creating an extremely fine layer of silver iodide—a photosensitive halide. This chemical layer gives the daguerreotype a degree of resolution far beyond that of any commercial film or pixel scanner.
Robinson runs out his count, snaps the slide back, and studies the plate for a telltale golden color. Satisfied, he transfers the plate to the bromine box and repeats the slide and count routine. Bromine is "faster" photographically, he explains, but too much bromine wipes out contrast. He orders the overhead lights off and withdraws the bromine slider under a red safelight. This light would still fog most modern films, but dags eat light: Even the fastest plates have a light sensitivity eight or nine f-stops slower than ASA 100. Robinson snaps the finished plate inside its light-tight holder. Thus he has sensitized three plates for the coming shoot, varying the times to bracket the exposure.
"This is the most demanding process I've ever done," he says, stretching out the predawn kinks. "It's also the most confounding thing I've ever done. With a dag, when something goes wrong, you don't have a clue. Just at the end you don't have an image." There are so many variables and no warnings if something has gone awry. Fortunately it's too late to worry, so we load up and move out.
Upstairs in the operating room, 20 minutes later, Bernstein cups a black rubber mask over his patient's face and lets her breathe oxygen for a few minutes. Then he settles the back of his head against an antique head stand. Because daguerreotypes drink in so much light, exposures have to be extraordinarily long: 25 seconds, 50 seconds, and 75 seconds in this case. The stand—a cast-iron monstrosity with a round, flowery base and a pair of adjustable tongs on top—steadies Bernstein's head and keeps him from smudging the image. Robinson inserts a sensitized plate into his camera—a meticulous rosewood reproduction of an antique once lent to Robinson—and withdraws a slide to let in the light. During the longest exposure, the beep of the heart monitor falls into sync with Robinson's voice, calling out the seconds. "Done!" Robinson cries, capping the lens. Then Bernstein switches the patient's IV to an opioid and a sedative, and she softly drops away to unconsciousness.
Out in the hallway, Robinson strips off his disposables and hurries to the lab. Once there he lights an alcohol spirit lamp under a pot of liquid mercury, filling the developing box with mercury vapor. Then he places the exposed plate over the vapor. "Now come the longest two and a half minutes in photography," he says. When the timer beeps, he pulls the plate out and gazes at it. There is something on the plate, he says, but it's still ephemeral. "The books say the latent image is as fragile as the dust on a butterfly wing. You could wipe it off with your finger."
The dust is silver. Inside the camera the focused light strikes the halides, sending an electric current flowing through the crystalline structure. Where the light is strongest, the charge is strongest. The stronger the negative charge on the plate, the more positively charged mercury vapor condenses onto it. The mercury washes the silver out of the halides, solubilizing and amalgamating it into free silver speckles. That's the fragile dust that marks out the exposed areas.
The plate goes into a sodium thiosulfate solution to dissolve the unexposed halides; it's rinsed with water and then washed with a gold chloride solution that's heated by an alcohol lamp. One by one the larger gold atoms displace the smaller atoms of free silver on the surface, creating more contrast. The fixed image is stable and durable.
The finished daguerreotype is a jeweled, one-of-a-kind object, no bigger than a hand mirror and shimmering with an eerie light. In a conventional photograph the image is embedded in the paper. Your eye reads the light reflecting off the white paper surface. In a daguerreotype the white areas are the silver/gold speckles that scatter light in all directions. The greater the scatter, the whiter the light looks. In the black areas the light bounces in and out at the same angle, reflecting very little. The light scatter makes a daguerreotype appear somewhat three-dimensional.
Robinson takes the plate by the edge gingerly and turns it to catch the light. My goodness, there is a tiny Dr. Bernstein in a tiny operating room, performing anesthesia. I look up. Robinson is grinning from ear to ear. I think of a London newspaper that heralded the ether news in 1846: "We Have Conquered Pain." What marvels, then and now.
