Wet collodion process
Colodión húmedo
- Date
- 1851 · confidence high
- Place
- London, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Frederick Scott Archer
- People
- 👤 Frederick Scott Archer1813–1857
- Field
- Communication
What it is
A glass negative coated with sensitised collodion, combining the detail of the daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the calotype and exposures of just seconds. Left unpatented, it became the standard for thirty years.
Archer died in poverty in 1857; Gustave Le Gray had proposed collodion in 1850 without developing it further.
What it led to
- War photography (Crimea 1855, the American Civil War) and expedition photography
- Cheap ambrotypes and tintypes for the working classes
- The carte de visite photograph (Disdéri, 1854) and portrait collecting
- Documentary and police photography
Built on
- Daguerreotype1839
- Calotype and negative-positive process1835-1841
- Collodion (dissolved nitrocellulose, 1846)
Made possible
- Additive colour photography1861
- Celluloid1862-1870
- Gelatin dry plate (1871)
- Maxwell's colour photography
- Astronomical and microscopic photography