Abney, William De Wiveleslie

(b. Derby, England, 24 July 1843; d. Folkestone, England, 2 December 1920)

photography, astronomy.

Abney was one of the founders of modern photography, combining a scientific approach, ingenuity, and manipulative skill with a talent for popularization. In later life his interest in color photography led him to investigate theories of color vision.

The eldest son of a clergyman. Abney graduated from the Royal Military Academy and served several years with the Royal Engineers in india before being invalided home. In 1869 he was made chemical assistant to the instructor in telegraphy at the Chatham School of Military Engineering, where he was able to pursue a boyhood interest in photography. His first book was Chemistry for Engineers (1870); his second, Instruction in Photography (1871), rapidly became a standard text.

Abney pioneered in the quantitative sensitometry of photographic images: his studies of how negatives blacken in response to varying amounts of incident light (1874, 1882) preceded the “D-log E” curves of F. Hurter and V. C. Driffield in use today. His early work tended to confirm the photochemical law of Robert Bunsen and Sir Henry Roscoe, which states that intensity of light and the time of exposure to it are reciprocally responsible for the effect produced; but when Julius Scheiner showed, beginning in 1888, that the density of stellar images did not follow this law, Abney was quick to confirm the “failure of reciprocity” in the laboratory, and himself discovered the related intermittency effect (1893).

Abney’s first astronomical publications were reports on an expedition he led to Egypt in December 1874, to photograph a transit of Venus across the face of the sun. In preparation for this expedition Abney—by then a captain—invented a dry photographic emulsion (1874): this, his “albumen beer” process, remained in use for general as well as solar photography until superseded by commercial gelatin products, He went on to study the chemistry of latent image developing (1877) and to introduce hydroquinone (1880), still one of the best developing agents known.

Extending his interests to spectroscopy. Abney was the first to suggest (1877) that stars with rapid axial rotation could be detected by broadened lines in their spectra—an idea later to have wide application. He then devised a red-sensitive emulsion and with it made the first spectroscopic analyses of the structure of orgainc molecules (1882) and the first photographs of the solar spectrum in the infrared (1887). This was followed by comparative studies of how sunlight is altered in passing through our atmosphere, made at sea level and in the Swiss Alps(1888, 1894).

In 1877 Abney began a long supervisory career with the Board of Education for England and Wales. He was already a member of the Royal Photographic society (which he served as president in 1892–1894, 1896, and 1903–1905), of the Royal Astronomical society (president 1893–1895), and of the physical society of London (president 1895–1897). He had been made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1876 and’ was awarded its Rumford Medal in 1882, for his spectroscopic work. He was knighted in 1900.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Original Works. The books and papers by Abney referred to above are Chemistry for Engineers (Chatham, 1870); Instruction in Photography (Chatham, 1871; 11th ed., London, 1906); “On the Opacity of the Developed Photographic Image,” in Philosophical Magazine, 4th ser., 48 (1874), 161–165; “Dry Plate Process for Solar Photography,” in Monthly Noticies of the Royal Astronomical Society, 34 (1874), 275–278; “Photography in the Transit of Venus,” ibid., 35 (1875), 309–310, with Abney’s report from the scene on 208 ; “Effect of a Star’s Rotation on Its Spectrum,’ ibid., 37 (1877), 278–279; “On the Alkaline Development of the Photographic Image,” in Philosophical Magazine, 5th ser., 3 (1877), 46–51; “A New Developer” [hydroquinone], in Photographic News, 24 (1880), 345–346; “On the “Sensitometric’ Sensitiveness of Gelatine and Other Plates,” in British Journal of Photography, 29 (1882), 243–244; “On the Influence of the Molecular Grouping in Organic Bodies on Their Absorption in the Infra-Red Region of the Spectrum,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 172 (1882), 887–918, written with E.R. Festing; “The Solar Spectrum, From λ7150 to λ10,000,” ibid., 177 (1887), 457–469; “Transmission of Sunlight Through the Earth’s Atmosphere,” ibid., A178 (1888), 251–283 and A184 (1894), 1–42; and “On a Failure of the Law in Photography That When the Products of the Intensity of the Light Acting and the time Exposure Are equal, Equal Amounts of Chemical Action Will Be Produced,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), 54 (1893), 143–147.

Other books by Abney include Thebes, and its Five Greater Temples (London, 1875); A Treatise on Photography (London, 1878; 10th ed., 1916); The Pioneers of the Alps (London.1888). written with C. D. Cunningham; A Facsimile of Christian Almer’s Führerbuch 1856–1894 (London, 1896). edited with C. D. Cunningham; and Researches in Colour Vision and the Trichromatic Theory (London, 1913), which summarizes his work in this field.

No complete list of Abney’s publications is available: the 117 items in the Royal Society of London’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, VII (London, 1877), 5; IX (London, 1891), 7–8; and XIII (Cambridge, 1914), 15–16, do not include anything published after 1900, or any of his numerous short papers in Photographic News, and only part of his publications in the Photographic Journal (London), of which Abney was editor from 1876 until his death. Many of these additional works are mentioned in Chapman Jones’s memorial lecture(see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Henry Chapman Jones wrote the article on Abney in Dictionary of National Biography, 3rd supp. (London, 1927), pp. 1–2, and also delivered a memorial lecture, printed in photographic Journal, 61 [n.s. 45 ] (1921), 296–310. An obituary notie, by col. Edmund Herbert Grove-Hills, with portrait, appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), A99 (1921), i-v; and another, by W.B. Ferguson, appeared in Photographic Journal,61 [n.s. 45 ] (1921), 44–46.

Sally H. Dieke