Lake Como & the Birth of Photography

Nineteenth century British mathematician and scholar William Henry Fox Talbot was on his honeymoon in Bellagio on Lake Como in 1833 when the idea of photography on paper came to him. Talbot and his wife Constance were using a lens called a Camera Lucida to draw pictures of the scenery. She was much better at it than he was.

In his own words: "...I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of Lake Como in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston's Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success. For when the eye was removed from the prism--in which all looked beautiful--I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold."

Frustruated, the idea occurred to him: "...how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!"

Where was Fox Talbot when the idea came to him? A solution to the mystery: click here