The Coal Merchant and Talbot – Richard Beard
Posted on 2nd June 2017 by Larry J Schaaf

Despite this potential embarrassment, Talbot had taken out a patent on the calotype process on 8 February 1841, which meant that anyone who wanted to use it for professional purposes had to apply to him for a license to do so. A number of would-be commercial photographers entered into negotiations with Talbot to achieve that end.

One of those was the coal merchant Richard Beard, the first person in England to actively pursue the commercial possibilities of photography. He invested in various aspects of the daguerreotype process in the hope that it could eventually be made to produce acceptable portraits. In early 1840, for example, Beard bought one half of the English rights to Wolcott’s Reflecting Apparatus, a camera invented in New York that relied on a concave mirror rather than a lens to reflect light onto a prepared daguerreotype plate. Sometime later he acquired these rights in their entirety, taking out a patent on the camera and related innovations on 13 June 1840. Beard also hired the services of John Frederick Goddard, until then a lecturer in optics and natural philosophy, to improve the chemistry of the daguerreotype. By September 1840 Goddard claimed to be able to bring exposure times down to one to four minutes by using bromide of iodine in his formula. This made portraiture possible, even if still difficult. Nevertheless, according to The Morning Chronicle of 12 September 1840, in Goddard’s first portraits “the eyes appear beautifully marked and expressive and the iris is delineated with a peculiar sharpness as well as the white dot of light on it, and this is done with such strength and clearness as to give the portrait a really astonishing appearance of life and reality.” Claiming his rights to the discovery as Goddard’s employer, Beard included the breakthrough in his patent document of 9 December 1840.

With these improvements in hand, Beard opened a commercial daguerreotype studio in the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London on 23 March 1841. He mistakenly presumed that his patent rights over the Wolcott camera and Goddard’s technical refinements of the daguerreotype process placed him outside the jurisdiction of Louis Daguerre’s own patent. Daguerre had been granted this patent on 14 August 1839 to cover the use of his invention within “England, Wales and the Town of Berwick-on-Tweed, and in all Her Majesty’s Colonies and Plantations abroad,” meaning that anyone in these designated areas wishing to practice the daguerreotype was legally obliged to pay Daguerre or his agent a license fee. Threatened with the closure of his studio, on 23 June 1841 Beard concluded negotiations with Miles Berry, Daguerre’s patent agent in England, and purchased the English patent rights to the daguerreotype process. On 16 July 1841 Beard also signed a license agreement with Daguerre and the son of Nicéphore Niépce, Isidore.