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So I'm a physicist, and one of the things I am involved here, at the University of Rochester, is running a nano-center.
And for most people, you think of nanotechnology as, for example, nanochips, tiny little electronic circuits,
but what you wouldn't expect is that nanotechnology is at the heart of the earliest form of photography - the daguerreotype.
The daguerreotype is the first successful medium of photography.
And it was a miraculous discovery by a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre.
In 1839, it became the predominant mode of photography from the moment that it was invented until about the Civil War.
The image that's formed in the daguerreotype is actually nanotechnology at work.
If you were to take the nanoparticles that form the image on the daguerreotype, you'd have to have between 100-1000 of them, stacked side by side, to be as big as a human hair.
George Eastman house was privileged to have one of the great collections of daguerreotypes in the world. Altogether in our collection, it’s about 5000 daguerreotypes and they’re from all over the world.
And as we studied the collection here at the George Eastman House and actually put on a major exhibition, we saw in real time some deterioration that we couldn’t explain. And that raised a lot of questions for us.
And in pursuing that, we found that the science was getting more and more complex and we needed a research capacity.
So we became involved with the George Eastman House in the project to look at that nanotechnology, understand how it happens, and also, how can we preserve it and save it.
One thing that we never would have expected is that the daguerreotype is a biologically active surface.
We discovered that on essentially every daguerreotype we looked at, there are small colonies of fungi growing, and those fungi are in fact damaging the surface.
We’ve worked to develop an argon, item level housing that could be replenished and monitored so that we can measure the oxygen inside the case.
Some day, we'll be able to understand better how to remediate deteriorated daguerreotype, but this will hold them in a state of suspended animation without any further deterioration.
Personally, what actually brought me into this project, was seeing a fantastic daguerreotype that was made of the Cincinnati skyline.
And what's remarkable about that daguerreotype is that if you blow it up, and blow it up, and blow it up, the level of resolution and detail in this nanotechnology photograph is fantastic.
A well-made daguerreotype by 1840-45 is able to be enlarged about 20-30 times and that’s not possible in most photography. You’d have to have a very very high megapixel camera to do that.
It is the first form of photography but it's also perhaps one of the first forms of controlled nanotechnology.
The people who discovered how to make this image almost 200 years ago, discovered how to put nanotechnology to work. They didn't mean to, but they did.
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