Remembering inventor and pioneering photographer Jules Dubosq
March 5, 2016 /Photography News/ Born 199 years ago today, on March 5, 1817, Louis Jules Dubosq was a French instrument maker, inventor, and pioneering photographer.
|"Still life with skull", by Louis Jules Duboscq, ca. 1850|
In 1844 David Brewster invented the stereoscope, a new invention that could take photographic images in 3D. Later, Louis Jules Duboscq took Brewster's invention, improved on it, began to manufacture the apparatus as well as to produce stereoscopic images.
In 1851, Dubosq dispayed his pictures in London where the stereoscope attracted the attention of Queen Victoria during one of her visits at Crystal Palace. As a consequence several British and continental makers started to produce stereoscopes and stereoscopic images, and within a few years hundreds of thousands of stereoscopes were sold.
In 1855, together with the chemist Henri Edme Robiquet, Dubosq improved the method of preserving dry collodion plates, and in 1861, he proposed the polyconograph, a camera attachment with a series of movable plateholders, which made it possible to produce a large number of small pictures on a single plate.
In the 1860s the famous microphotographs of Rene Dagron were produced with Dubosq's equipment, and in the same years Dubosq presented an arc-light apparatus for enlarging photographic images.
Dubosq also made several pioneering experiments on moving image technology.
Among other instruments he built were a colorimeter, a polarimeter, and a heliostat.
Duboscq won medals at the World's Fair in London in 1851, and in Paris in 1855 and 1856. In 1853 he published Practical Rules For Photography which discussed his apparatus. He was also an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
Dubosq died on September 24, 1886.