Description: |
This collection contains documents copied from the Joseph Hamel Collection in the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, pertaining to the photographic innovations and legacy of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833).
Scientist Joseph Christianovich Hamel (1786-1862), a Russian of German descent, became a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) in 1813. Starting in 1829, he held a special post in the Department of Technology and Chemistry that involved investigating scientific advances and new technologies in Europe and the United States, and sending information back to the Academy.
In 1839 Hamel gathered information about photography in both London and Paris, and became interested in the heated priority debates. He collected documents related to Niépce’s experiments from Franz (Francis) Andreas Bauer (1758-1840), the Austrian botanical illustrator to whom Niépce had given several specimens of his héliographie process in Kew in late 1827. In Paris, Hamel collected additional materials including family correspondence dating as early as 1787 from Niépce’s son Isidore (1795-1868).
Hamel collected original and copied correspondence between Niépce and optician Vincent Chevalier (1770-1841) and engraver Augustin François Lamaître (1797-1870), as well as William Townsend Aiton (1766-1849), superintendent of the Royal Gardens at Kew, and British scientists including William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875). Hamel also collected letters between Niépce and his brother Claude (1763-1828) and between Niépce (and later Isidore) and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851).
These documents were donated to the Academy in 1875 by Hamel’s nephew. Transcriptions of these documents were published in Dokumenty Po Istorii Izobreteniia Fotografii (Documents on the History of the Invention of Photography), compiled by the Academy’s archivist Torichan Pavlovich Kravets (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk, 1949; re-printed by Arno Press, 1979). Many of the documents are also transcribed in Niepce: Correspondance et Papiers, ed. Manuel Bonnet and Jean-Louis Marignier (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes: Musée Nicéphore Niépce, 2003).
Historian Larry J. Schaaf photocopied the entire collection while in St. Petersburg on a research trip funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1993, and donated his copies to the Ransom Center in 2003. Schaaf’s NEH application and final report are included in the papers. |
