Telegraph services and infrastructure in the British Isles are taken into state
ownership, under the control of the Postmaster General.
l
Heyl’s Phasmatrope—involving painstaking process of photographic animation—is
demonstrated in Philadelphia.
l
Celluloid trade-marked in US by John W Hyatt (see also 1861, 1865). or was this 1873
January 14??
l
Sir William Thomson (knighted for services to engineering in 1866) devises a
siphon recorder that can record a received telegraph signal on paper.
l
Joseph Bamforth Limited is founded at Holmfirth, Yorkshire to produce picture
postcards and lantern slides. At first the cards are hand-coloured.
l
Charles Adams in New York starts to manufacture Adams New York Gum No 1, a chewing gum.
1871
May
Half-tone photographs, to illustrate Photography by Typographic Printing
Press, published in Stockholm by engraver Carl Gustaf Wilhelm Carleman.
July
Half-tone illustrations are first used in a magazine, Nordisk
Boktrycheri-Tidning (Nordic Printing News).
September 8
Dr Richard Leach Maddox describes a silver bromide gelatine photographic
emulsion allowing much shorter exposure times.
l
Antonio Meucci files a patent caveat on an
electric telephone.
l
UK's Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company lays an undersea telegraph
cable between Java and Darwin, Northern Territories, where it connects with the Australian
Overland Telegraph.
l
Process for cutting halftone blocks for printing photographs in newspapers is
introduced.
1872
April
William Henry Ward of New York files for a patent on a transmission system using a
telegraph tower 'broadcasting' to a number of receiving antennae.
l
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904, né Edward James
Muggeridge in Kingston-on-Thames, England but resident on San Francisco) is commissioned by
Governor Leland Stanford of California to take instantaneous photographs of a favourite race horse.
Muybridge builds a photographic apparatus with tripwires to record the motion of the horse as it
passes a series of trackside cameras. Thus begins Muybridge's series of experiments in the USA to
photograph animals and humans in motion.
Patent granted for system of communication by aerial conduction is granted to
Mahlon Loomis, a dentist in Washington DC, who had observed the effects on telegraphs in Maryland
during an auroral storm in 1859.
l
Several British-controlled telegraph companies, mostly formed by John Pender,
merge to become the Eastern Telegraph Company.
l
First overseas telegraph service from Japan is established via submarine cables
between Nagasaki and Shanghai and Vladivostock.
1873
l
James Clerk Maxwell postulates light as part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
l
Photo-sensitive properties of selenium are
discovered by a telegraph operator called Joseph May. Acting on this report, the principle of selenium's
photo-sensitivity is confirmed by Willoughby Smith, an engineer with the Telegraph Construction
Maintenance Company in Britain, while devising a means of testing undersea telegraph cables as they
are being laid, and reported in the Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers.
l
The relationship that resistance of selenium varies directly with the square root
of the illumination is found by W G Adams.
l
Electric motor using DC current, invented by Zénobe Gramme (1826-1901) of Belgium,
exhibited in Vienna.
1874
l
In France, Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824-1907) makes multiple exposure
photographs of the transit of Venus across the sun.
l
First purpose-built cable-laying ship is launched.
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