11-23-03 @ 2:55 am EST

Yesterday the two CDs that I won at eBay a little while back arrived, First Under The Wire by the Little River Band and The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. (I grew up listening to these on eight track. I have yet to get Neil Diamond's I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight and You Don't Bring Me Flowers, though maybe someday. So I was brainwashed into liking these albums from an early age, okay?)

Now, as I just said I grew up listening to these particular albums on eight track. I acquired them on cassette maybe a year or so ago; now that I'm FINALLY getting acclimated to CDs, I wanted them on that. They arrived and I looked over the sparse liner notes as I checked them out. On earlier CDs, the jackets weren't really considered the art form they are today, apparently, because there is practically nothing to them--on both of these CDs they are just one-page half folds, the Kenny Rogers one completely blank inside and the Little River Band one containing merely the track listing, song credits, and thank you's. Aside from the original cover art on the front there is nothing more to them. There is actually more info on the BACK of the Kenny Rogers CD than in its jacket.

(Yes, this entry eventually does get to the French people. Keep reading.)

I looked at the album years of release, figuring that these must be "reprints" (reissues, I should say), as I assumed CD technology did not exist back when these originally came out--1978 and 1979, to be exact. One hint about this was a note included in the jacket of the Little River Band CD:

COMPACT DISC DIGITAL AUDIO

The Compact Disc Digital Audio System offers, on a small, convenient sound-carrier, state-of-the-art sound reproduction. The Compact Disc's superior performance is the result of laser-optical scanning combined with digital playback, and is independent of the technology used in making the original recording.

For best results, apply the same care in storing and handling Compact Discs as you would with conventional records. No cleaning will be necessary if the Compact Disc is always held by the edges and is replaced in its case immediately after playing. Should the Compact Disc become soiled with fingerprints, dust or dirt, it can be wiped (always in a straight line, from center to edge) with a clean, soft, dry, lint-free cloth. No solvent or abrasive cleaner should ever be used. If you follow these suggestions, your Compact Discs will provide a lifetime of pure listening enjoyment.

Now...why would such an antique note be placed in a new CD jacket, right? In a time when just about EVERYBODY except maybe African Bushmen and those Indians deep in the South American jungle (and probably even most of them nowadays) knows how to handle and use CDs, a "duh" note like this must come from an early CD jacket.

Yet they didn't have CDs back in the late Seventies. Or so I assumed. I did remember seeing ads for CD players in very old issues of National Geographic, which surprised me, and I figured the TECHNOLOGY existed, but I figured that CDs themselves just weren't in popular usage. Growing confused, I decided to just...go online and look. Enter Google, alleviator of mass confusion and righter of mental wrongs!

I wasn't sure what exactly to type in at Google at first. So I tried "invention of compact disc" (even though I spell it "disk," most other people don't). One of the results informed me I should have tried "history of the CD" or "history of the compact disc" instead...but anyway. I found a very interesting timeline of CD technology spanning back to the 1800's (when wax-cylinder phonographs or whatever they were first came into existence). After a while of browsing I learned that CDs first came on the US market in the early Eighties (it was either '82 or '83, I believe)...verifying my belief that my two arrivals were reissues of some sort. Well, all right, that was all I really cared to know. Pointless history lesson finished. Must browse elsewhere now.

However, as the way often is with me, I got caught up in one of those "invention timeline" pages, which gave a rundown of the invention dates of other well-known items. I learned that the world's very first photograph was from 1826...and that it took EIGHT HOURS to produce! Interested, I copied the inventor's name and plugged it in at Google. One of the results was a news article about this very first image...I followed the link.

Niepce Symposium Unveils 1826 Photograph

By ANDREW BRIDGES
AP Science Writer

November 21, 2003, 12:05 PM EST

LOS ANGELES -- An 1826 image widely acknowledged as the world's earliest photograph is the subject of its own close-up, the first in the half-century since a historian hauled the faint snapshot out of an old trunk.

The fresh portrait of the first photo was unveiled Friday during an Austin, Texas, symposium celebrating the life and work of pioneer photographer Joseph Nicephore Niepce (pronounced Nee'-sah-for Nee'-yeps).

The best-known image of Niepce's photograph had been a hand-retouched mosaic compiled from several partial images. Along with the new, unmanipulated reproduction, scientists are presenting the results of an unprecedented checkup on the condition of the 8-inch-by-6.5-inch image, which shows the view from a window of Niepce's family home.

"Altogether, the first photograph is in good shape and has a chance of remaining so for a long time," said Dusan Stulik, a senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, where experts spent two weeks analyzing the image in 2002.

Conservators since have repaired the image's frame and are building a replacement for the photo's 1960s-era protective case. The new airtight case is a version of one developed to house the royal mummy collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

"I wanted to know it was there and to know it wouldn't suffer any deterioration in putting it on public display," said Roy Flukinger, senior curator of photography at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The first photograph was rediscovered in 1952. The center acquired it in 1963. Today, it displays the faint image alongside a Gutenberg Bible, a first in its own right. Altogether, the center houses 5 million photographs, 1 million rare books, 36 million manuscripts, about 60,000 works of art and hundreds of reels of movie film.

The 2002 analysis of Niepce photo confirmed that he used a polished plate of pewter coated with a thin layer of bitumen to create the image.

During an exposure that took anywhere from eight hours to three days, the light-sensitive petroleum derivative hardened. Washing the plate with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum dissolved the unexposed portions of bitumen.

The resulting image shows the view from Niepce's family home in the French town of St-Loup-de-Varennes.

The view, much like the photograph that captured it, remains to this day and can be seen live over the Internet through the lens of a camera recently set up to mark the symposium.

* __

On the Net:

Ransom Center: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/

Niepce house Web cam: http://www.niepce.net/live/live.html
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-first-photograph,0,5954027.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

Very interesting! After reading that I really REALLY wanted to see this old photograph...but...there were no images in the article! Fooey! They SAID there was a live webcam I could view...so I clicked on the Niepce house cam to see the photo for myself. If I was going to find it anywhere, it must be there.

It wasn't much of an image. By today's standards, it would be considered a crappy test shot. The view isn't even good. But simply what I learned about it made up for that. Eight hours, it turns out, was a generous estimate--it could have taken as long as THREE DAYS to take this one photograph! Talk about your long exposure! The world's VERY FIRST PHOTOGRAPH was taken by a Frenchman named Joseph Nicephore Niepce with a device known as the camera obscura (that's the title of a song from Enigma's The Screen Behind The Mirror album, BTW! ^_^ ), and the process involved just in taking it...ugh. I could not understand a word of what I read. But it was still very intriguing.

I decided to check out some more of the Niepce website to see if it gave a timeline of events in the history of the world's first photo. And it does. Again, I could not understand most of it...far too technical for my poor brain, I'm afraid. :/ But I still liked looking over it. The trouble this guy went to just to make a PERMANENT image, and one that wasn't a negative or a mere etching. He had a lot more patience than I would EVER have.

In particular I found this one page in the timeline about how the world's first photographs were actually produced (the English is rather mangled, as I assume the site was built by a French speaker):

1825-1829 > INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In 1824, he [Niepce] put lithographic stones, coated with bitumen ,at the back of a camera obscura and obtains for the first time a fixed image of a landscape. This required an extremely long exposure time , in broad daylight , of a few days. Starting in 1825, he used regularly copper as a base, then tin in 1826, and realised etched images.

In 1827, Niépce went to England where he found his brother dying, unable to show any improvement to the engine . He realisesd then that they would never get any profit from this invention in which they had invested so much hope . After having vainly tried to get the attention of the Société Royale to his reproduction process of images that he calls Heliography , Niépce came back to France and relentlessly worked to improve his invention . In 1828 he found a new method that led to superior quality images with half-tones . Using as a base polished silver and letting interact iodine vapours on the bitumen image he obtained genuine photographs in black and white on the metal plate .The preciseness of these images is amazing for the time .The exposure time is still many days in broad sunlight .

> Principle and technique of HELIOGRAPHY with the camera obscura

The photosensitive agent is Judea bitumen .
It is a sort of natural tar known from ancient time. People in antiquity used to collect it from the Dead Sea surface ( in greek Asphaltite lake ) where it keeps surfacing continually from the bottom of the sea. It was used by the Egyptians to embalm mummies, to caulk ships or even to make terrace works in Babylon. In the 19th century, people already knew how to extract that tar from bituminous rocks and as a matter of fact the bitumen used by Niépce did not come from Judea.

1 - Obtention of a Judea bitumen image :

> Niépce dissolved powdered Judea bitumen in lavender oil.

> Then he spread this solution in a very thin layer on a base ( glass , stone , copper , tin , silver).

> With a hot drying process he got a shiny varnish with a cherry red color.

> He would then expose the varnished plate in a camera obscura (here a slide projection).

> After exposure, there was no visible image. Niépce would dip the plate in a diluted lavender oil bath that would dissolve the bitumen parts that had not been exposed or very little to light.

> The resulting image, seen with a normal incidence, was negative.
The exposure time in a camera obscura was quite a few days in broad sunlight.

2 - Utilization of a Judea bitumen image :

> To get a positive image , Niépce used the image in two ways : without any further processing under the condition to make this image with an extremely thin layer of varnish with a slight underexposure ( from 1827 on ). In this case the varnish was mat and by reflection , with a low angled light and in a dark place , the image would appear as a positive.

> Submitting the silver plate to iodine vapors to get a positive image (from 1828 to 1831 ) Niépce would place it in a box with iodine crystals that evaporated spontaneously.

> Within a few minutes the iodine fumes oxydized the silver insufficiently protected by the varnish. This created a layer of silver iodide on the metal surface, which once the varnish was eliminated, would blacken under the action of light.

> He would get a posiive image.

http://www.niepce.net/pagus/invus3.html (nonframed page--framed page here: http://www.niepce.net/pagus/pagus-inv.html )

I find it kind of funny that as I was browsing this site...I was also browsing a photography site for nice images to use on my desktop. Very interesting. And to think that none of those images would even be online today...if not for a French guy named Niepce. I didn't even realize this until AFTER reading up on the website...and then decided to come here and post this little history lesson.

I'm willing to bet that anyone with enough time and interest would find a lot of other everyday things that we now take for granted, yet rely upon heavily, which were invented or perfected by French people. Hmmmmmm.

And so...those of you (hopefully few) people who are so insistent that the French are good for NOTHING and have NEVER contributed anything worthwhile to society, just because of their conflict with our war policy...? I suggest you either research your own little history lesson the way I did tonight (I found all this stuff out about CDs AND photography in under an hour, BTW)...or else go throughout your entire house...and collect every camera, videocamera, television, VHS tape, DVD, interactive CD-ROM, snapshot, print, poster, coffeetable book, magazine, encyclopedia, family portrait, scrapbook, photo album, and yes, ANYTHING at all in your house that has a photographic image of some sort on it...and dump them all in the trash. Because if it were not for some random FRENCH guy, you would not even OWN those things right now. (And if you're even thinking about saying, "Well, some OTHER guy would've eventually come up with the idea"...well...some other guy DIDN'T--it was a FRENCH guy who did it first. And what can you say to THAT?)

If not for a Frenchman named Niepce, the American media and entertainment business would probably be practically nonexistent in the form they have now. Bye-bye family portraits! Bye-bye CNN! Bye-bye Playboy centerfolds! Bye-bye Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy! (**99.9% of readers faint in horror**)

Still so reluctant to tear down the Statue of Liberty? A French guy created that too, remember. I am amused by the selective memory of some people. I guess I should not be surprised that they do not possess a PHOTOGRAPHIC memory...because then they would be admitting that a French person actually contributed something worthwhile to society. Hmmm?

Tar...