William Henry Fox Talbot

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Born: 11 Feb 1800 in Melbury Abbas, Dorset, England
Died: 17 Sept 1877 in Lacock Abbey (near Chippenham), Wiltshire, England

 

Henry Fox Talbot studied at Cambridge and wrote papers on elliptic integrals, building on work of Euler, Legendre, Jacobi and Abel. For this work he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1831.

In addition to his mathematical work, Talbot also published on astronomy and physics. He gave the Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society in 1837 with the title Further observations on the optical phenomena of crystals and he received the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1838.

In 1833 Talbot was elected to parliament but retired one year later. He was a close friend of John Herschel and together they studied light. An interest in chemistry, together with his interest in light, took him into photography and he is best remembered for his pioneering work in this area.

In 1844 he published Pencil of nature the first photographically illustrated book. He was also interested in archaeology and was one of the first to translate the cuneiform writing from Nineveh.