Pyrotechnics and photography: saltpeter and the colonial history of photographic lighting

Abstract

Bengal light was among the earliest commercial sources of artificial lighting for photographic use, patented as Photogen in February 1857. Essentially, a pyrotechnic flare whose vital ingredient was saltpeter, it was mined by low caste laborers in Bengal, which had emerged as the leading global producer of saltpeter by the eighteenth century. Saltpeter was a coveted global commodity because it served as the primary material for the manufacture of gunpowder and also had wide-ranging industrial applications. Its use for photography provides an early instance of the commodification and trade in lighting technologies and materials, challenging dominant assumptions about photographic light as a freely available natural resource accessible to all. It asserts the presence of artificial lighting in early photography to contest invocations to the sun and divine light that dominate characterizations of the period. Finally, saltpeter ties early photographic lighting into a wider imperial trade of commodities for war, to further cement the analogies between the camera and the gun noted in many photographic studies. Encapsulated in its use is an imperial history of global trade that hinged on extraction of natural sources, colonial labor, and alliances between military and industrial technologies of light.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Michelle Henning and Theresa Mikuriya for organizing the conference and the journal issue. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the feedback from the anonymous reviewers, which encouraged me to refine my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cited in Grech, Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education, 84.

2. While the predominant reading of Wilde’s story has highlighted the Whistler connection, Jarlath Killeen presents it as an allegory for nationalist aspirations associated with Guido Fawkes Gunpowder Plot. See Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 97–104.

3. In the early nineteenth century the term pyrotechny was used for both war and spectacular display, indicated in the very title of books on the subject: Traité Pratique des Feus D’Artifice, pour le Spectacle et pour la Guerre (1800) or Cutbush A System of Pyrotechny.

4. On the popularity of fireworks in European courtly celebrations see Werrett, Fireworks. They were also popular in the Mughal courts of the same period in India and represented in Mughal and painting. Although the Mughal empire was characterized as one of the three “Gunpowder empires” in early historical analyses, that characterization has largely receded with recent histories of British monopoly over gunpowder.

5. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night.

6. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 84.

7. Flint, “Fireworks.” David Nye even presents the fascination with urban illuminations as “an undying fireworks.” Nye, American Illuminations, 9.

8. Flint, Flash!

9. I use terrestrial to distinguish earth bound resource extraction from solar economies of light. Needless to say, solar infrastructures have spawned their own material culture and despite the paeans to clean energy, also conceive of light as commodity with all its attendant concerns.

10. On the analogies between photography and war see Virilio, War and Cinema; Ryan, Picturing Empire; and Kittler, Optical Media.

11. Parikka, The Geology of Media, 5.

12. See Azoulay, Potential History.

13. McCauley’s study undertakes a valuable examination of the industrialization of photography but does not attend to the industrialization of light per se. McCauley, Industrial Madness.

14. See Frizot, “Who’s afraid of Photons?” 269–83 and Seppänen, “Unruly Representation.” An exception to this has been Tania Woloshyn’s wonderful study, which examines various technologies, photographic and otherwise, that manipulated sunlight and shaped cultural practices. Woloshyn, Soaking up the Rays.

15. McLuhan, Understanding Media; and Virilio, The Vision Machine.

16. See Bowers, Lengthening the Day; Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire; Otter, The Victorian Eye; Dillon, Artificial Sunshine; and Clayson, Illuminated Paris.

17. Simon Carter calls them “helio-humans”. See Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health. See also, Dinkar, Empires of Light; Thompson, Shine; and Montano, Electrifying Mexico.

18. Dodd, Curiosities of Industry, 79.

19. See Wilder, Photography and Science; and Henning, The Unfettered Image, 95–99.

20. See Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine.

21. Cited in Thomas, History of Photography, 7–8.

22. See Jolly and DeCourcy, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle.

23. Consider the proceedings of The London Photographic Society published in a letter to the editor by Vernon Heath in January 1861. British Journal for Photography, 39.

24. See Zallen, on the extraction of elemental phosphorus from the South American port cities of the Rio de La Plata and later for phosphates from the West Indian guano islands for the production of lucifer friction matches. American Lucifers, 168–213.

25. See “Manufacture of Magnesium,” 146.

26. Howes, To Photograph Darkness, 18–71.

27. Fyfe, “Photographic Processes,” 179.

28. Miles, The Burning Mirror, 97–132. Douglas Nickel too has examined romantic appropriations of sun imagery in the first decade of photography to explore how their theological and mystical rhetoric bolstered the claim for the photograph as created by supernatural forces. See Nickel, “Talbot’s Natural Magic,” 132–40.

29. American Journal of Science and Arts, 169–87.

30. Henning, “The Worlding of Light and Air,” 177–98.

31. Zallen, American Lucifers.

32. Bille and Sorensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity,” 263–84.

33. Eder, History of Photography, 528.

34. Pritchard, “Artificial Lighting,” 84.

35. “Photography at Night,” The Photographic and Fine Art Journal, July 1859, 56.

36. See for instance, Frey, “The Indian Saltpeter Trade,” 507–54; Brown, A Most Damnable Invention, 25–50; and Buchanan, “Saltpetre: A Commodity of Empire,” 67–90.

37. See Bhattacharya, “Gunpowder and its Applications in Ancient India,” 42–50.

38. A good account of the manufacture and trade of saltpeter in India is provided in Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, 431–47.

39. Cited in Frey, “The Indian Saltpeter Trade,” 523.

40. On the merchants who mediated between the laborers and the European trading companies see Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India; and Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities.”

41. Cressy, Saltpeter.

42. Buchanan, “Saltpetre: A Commodity of Empire,” 67.

43. Janeway, “A History of Artificial Illumination, ”122.

44. Buss, “Observations on the Artificial Light,” 137–38. This needs to be juxtaposed against the American chemist James Cutbush’s claim that the composition of Bengal light was kept a secret, only revealed after the French writer A. M. Thomas Morel purchased the original formula, which was divulged in his book, Traité Pratique des Feus D’Artifice, pour le Spectacle et pour la Guerre (1800). See Cutbush, A System of Pyrotechny, 378.

45. See The Rise and Progress of the British Explosives Industry. Published under the auspices of the VII International Congress of Applied Chemistry, by its Explosives Section. (New York: Whittaker and Co., 1909).

46. Flint, “Fireworks.”

47. See “The Explosion of Two Firework Manufactories,” 75–76.

48. On Brock Company history see Smee and Macrory, Gunpowder and Glory and “Fireworks” The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, Vol. 2, July-December 1891, 468–74.

49. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, The History of Photography, 426–27.

50. “Newcastle Photographic Society” in The Photographic News, 10 May 1861, 224.

51. See above 35, 56.

52. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, The History of Photography, 426.

53. A Lover of Fair Play, “Patents in Photography,” The Photographic and Fine Art Journal, 4 January, 1860.

54. He was issued patent no. 575 of 30 October 1852. See Michael Pritchard, “Artificial Lighting”, 84. In 1855 Lucenay received a patent for certain improvements in the batteries of guns and pistols.

55. See above 33, 529.

56. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, 429.

57. “The Eiffel Tower,” The Scientific American Supplement No. 705 (6 July 1889), 11258–11260.

58. On Thomas Bigg’s photographic career see Dewan, “Captain Biggs and Doctor Pigou,” 6–13.

59. Biggs, “Photography in Interiors — Illumination.” Biggs provides a more complete account of the technical challenges he faced in India in “A Retrospect of Photographic Experiences” British Journal of Photography, 231–32.

60. “Newcastle Photographic Society” Photographic News, Vol. 5, No. 140, 10 May 1861, 223–24.

61. On magnesium for cave photography see Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Jan-Dec 1865, (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1866), 163.

62. Chris Howes, To Photograph Darkness, 4.

63. Maddalena and Packer have argued that flag telegraphy was an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Coston’s signal as a night-time equivalent was likewise implicated. On flag telegraphy see Maddalena and Packer, “The Digital Body,” 93–117.

64. Webster, “The Future of Artificial Lighting,” 145.

65. Vogel, The Progress of Photography, 106–7.

66. “Letter to the Editor: The Luxograph” by Thomas Chilton, British Journal of Photography, 23 December 1910, No. 2642, Vol. 57, 983.

67. Frey, “The Indian Saltpeter Trade,” 552–53.

68. Virilio, War and Cinema, 14–15.

69. Kittler, Optical Media, 159–60.

70. See above 42, 67.

71. Virilio, War and Cinema, 110.

72. Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition”, Comparative Studies in Society and HistoryVol. 31, No.2, 1989, p. 221.

73. Lloyd, Under Representation, 18.

74. Lloyd, Under Representation, 7.

75. Azoulay, Potential History.

76. Cited in Dewan, “Captain Biggs and Doctor Pigou,” 6.

77. For an example of the negotiations between European painters and their subaltern assistants see Howes, “Colin Mackenzie, the Madras School of Orientalism and Investigations at Mahabalipuram,” 74–109.

78. I have addressed the drama of seeing in the colonial reception of the caves in more detail in Chapter 1 of my book, Empires of Light.

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Niharika Dinkar

Niharika Dinkar teaches art history at Boise State University and is interested in the intersections between art and technology in nineteenth century South Asia. She is the author of Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India (University of Manchester Press, 2019) and is currently working on an archaeology of cinematic practices involving the animal in nineteenth century visual culture.