Excerpt from Cantor Lectures on the Recent Improvements in Photo-Mechanical Printing Methods: Delivered Before the Society of Arts, January 28, February 4, 11, 1884

The perfection of united photography and printing is thus to make the shadow into a solid substance, and so to obtain a plate or block from which impressions can be taken on the printing machine, and in this direction much practical progress has been made since the time when it was my privilege last to address you.

One point to which allusion has just been made may perhaps be again mentioned. The printer, whether he work from type, from an engraved block, or from a printing surface obtained by the aid of photography, can select his pigment, and, as a matter of fact, be generally selects one of which the basis is lamp-black; consequently, exposure to light and air will not cause the print to fade. The photographer, who makes his pictures by a photo-chemical method, has to content himself with such a colouring material as he can get - generally metallic silver or a mixture of this metal with gold. The consequence is that the earlier photographs are now mostly faded, and one may safely say that not a single copy of Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature can be said to have altogether survived the forty years or so which has elapsed since its publication. Notice the copy which is lying on the table, and see if you can find a single picture which shows no sign of fading. The first photo mechanical process, however, which gave really good representations of scenes of nature, is the photoglyphic method of Talbot, and although the gradations of tone are not represented in quite the same degree of per fection as is the case with Talbot's pictures by his calotype or silver-printing process, we have the enormous advantage of permanency.

Here are some examples of Talbot's photo glyphic method, printed in ordinary carbon ink from the intaglio plate, and issued with the News in 1858. Where, indeed, will you find silver print a quarter of a century old which shows no sign of fading?

To unite the permanency of the press-print and its rapidity of production with the exact ness of the camera picture is the aim of the photo-mechanical experimentalist; and let me now pass on to some of the advances made since the date of my last lectures.

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