[Mercury]

Je vous en prie, Mike. A small thing, since you are now my teacher. Fair enough, but I still like to nail you now and then!

Ken

[Mercury]

Hello Larry,

Glad to hear you will be coming to Philly! I’m bunking with Mike R as usual. We will arrive on Wednesday. I look forward to meeting you, please drop by our room or find me in the crowd. Say hello to Lynne G. if you get the chance.

Ken

[Mercury]

John, thanks for the confirmation on the balance of the equation and for your concern.

Thank you too for bringing up Baczynski’s “How to Make a Daguerreotype.” That should stay current as a definitive guide for how NOT to do things.

I’ll definitely be thinking about how to balance this philosophical equation, since as far as passing risky information to unsuspecting chemical neophytes is concerned, we’re way too late! It’s already out there on the web via a simple keyword search, often uploaded from printed books that have been in circulation for decades, with far less cautionary information than has been exchanged in this thread on CDags. (The book I cited in my original post actually says “This method of collecting pure bromine by distillation is relatively safe.” I think that is a gross underestimation of the risk!) The book’s introduction is entitled “To the Teacher” and states that it is written “…for young people who are learning to be citizens.” (A dose of cold-war rhetoric, I think.)

I don’t believe we have been advocating or giving specific instructions, but rather exchanging information. I agree that we have, however, failed to appropriately salt our exchanges with cautions about the very real dangers of trying to reduce this information to practice.

So I ask that this discussion continue, since it ultimately has bearing on every aspect of daguerreian chemistry and the elements involved!

Respectfully,

Ken

p.s. And yes, John, I’m looking forward to LOTS of pictures! It’s our moment.

[Mercury]

Photolytic’s points are well taken. There is considerably more background to the information that I posted but I kept it short, figuring that 1) I didn’t want to bog the blog down with too long a post initially, and 2) if anyone had any questions about the background (including a thorough calculation of the molecular weights of the reagents involved and a balanced chemical equation) I could either post it or supply it individually. This “Renaissance Man” as he is coming to be known I guess, did not rely on any table of chemical quantities for his reaction recipe. Rather, he found the equation, then did make his calculations using atomic weights and concentrations of the components. It’s all in his notes.

I should have applied a more cautionary tone, however. Photolytic, I’ll pull my posting until you’re satisfied with the stoichiometry. If you would like to see the complete dossier I’ll be glad to scan it for you, but since I’m leaving for France in under two days, that will have to wait 10 days or so.

I must admit being caught up in the excitement of being able to share this information with others who are already working in the same vein.

[Mercury]

Andy, I await with brominated breath….

Photolytic, I’ve experienced the same thing. I think some manufacturers expect that the product will be used up in a short period of time, i.e. months.

[Mercury]

Here here, Andy. I just found similar pure PTFE thick-walled bottles from Cole-Parmer. They offer both a narrow and wide-mouth bottle, pure PTFE caps included. The root Cole-Parmer cat no.’s are: SF-06300 and SF-06200, They are available in a wide capacity range. Spendy little suckers, but it might be the next generation. These have thick enough walls that I don’t think weeping will be an issue for a VERY long time, if ever.

I’m with Andy about glass bottles, it’s the CAPS that are the weak link. It may not be long before the molded PTFE caps for the above bottles are available separately for use on glass bottles? Hope springs eternal. A cap springs a leak.

[Mercury]

Hello all,

I think the bottles labeled “Poly-Seal” (Wheaton) have a Polyethylene cone liner, not polypropylene. Polyethylene has poor resistance to halogens and other strong oxidizers. I use wide-mouth quart amber jars with a PTFE-lined polypropylene cap. They work great for things like diluted quicks. I haven’t tried, and won’t try them for pure bromine. PTFE lined phenolic would probably be my choice for a narrow-mouth glass bottle for the reagent.

I’ve been storing bromine and iodine monochloride reagents in Teflon bottles with FEP caps for over ten years now. They seem to be doing OK, seal wise, but I have noticed that a certain tiny amount of transpiration is taking place through the bottle walls. For instance, I had a white plastic tape label on the bromine that I had to remove after about 5 years. The adhesive side was yellow and smelled fairly strongly of bromine. Tough stuff!

Andy, do everything you can to keep that bromine in the original bottle and cap! Then save it for when you start making your own.

Ken

[Mercury]

I am happy to say that I will be able to carefully inspect all of your work in Bry. AND I will have a camera, though I don’t know if I will be able to post from there. But there will be no shortage of photos to share.

They say things happen in threes? This, the 170th (1), is in Daguerre’s town (2), so I make it the occasion of my first trip to France (3). Tres bien! If the next big show like this is on the 200th in 2039 I’ll either be 83 or dead so I figured I’d better get off my butt and go to this one.

I second “dagist” in saluting Marc for such a major undertaking!

A biento,

Ken

[Mercury]

Hello all,

I believe Grant Romer experimented with a Zeiss UV-Sonnar quartz lens on a Hasselblad back in the 80’s. In my recollection his results were similarly inconclusive, i.e., no discernible increase in speed.

[Mercury]

Hello Jon,

 

Oh, we looked so confident and rock-bandish in the photo published in Astronomy! Compare that with the tentative and perhaps overly serious faces we wore for the “first” official portrait of the Lunar Daguerreian Society at the start of the 1985 season.

 

That big 12 inch refractor required a MUCH larger dome than the modern 24 inch reflector, hence the sense of space. We got better images with the modern telescope, but being in the big dome with that venerated telescope, just the four of us in the deep of the night, was a much preferred and very moving experience.

 

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[Mercury]

Hello Rob and John,

I shipped my daguerreotypes via FedEx on Monday 8/17. Fedex tracking showed that the box was delivered to the museum in Bry on Friday the 21st. I have not gotten confirmation from Marc that he’s seen the box. The processing of paperwork for my box by our local FedEx agent was completely computerized, and we were careful to note that the contents were for temporary exhibition and return, though I don’t remember encountering an “ATA Carnet” form. It arrived in Paris at about 2 a.m. on 8/20, International release was at 6:30 p.m., and it was delivered at 11:30 a.m. on 8/21.

What I did disturbingly encounter was that FedEx has a definite limit on the insurance value that one can declare on international shipments without the requirement of special forms and releases, but I think those originate on the US side. Since I’d packed my dags very carefully, I bit the bullet and went to that limit and not more. (2500 USD for the whole box.)

I’m sure that Marc is up to his eyeballs at this point, but I haven’t received any indication that any bond had to be posted for my box.

Hope this helps,

Ken

[Mercury]

Thank you. Your position as editors further ensures the continued success of the CDag Forum.

We are all here, after all, to ENJOY the Contemporary Daguerreotype!

[Mercury]

No better method, ideas, or sources. Just a comment:

Welcome! You’re in Portland, I’m in Seattle. Nice to have someone local to talk to. Who the heck are you?

I’m not a chemist at this (or any) level. I’m still working on the supply of Br that I was fortunate enough to buy many years ago. It is now stored in Teflon bottles (so they couldn’t break like glass), but even they seem to transpire and I’d like to go back to glass with a screw cap that is impervious to Br. I’m looking for a supplier, hopefully that will sell in less than “case quantity” i.e. 24 500 ml bottles. I need two, maybe three.

Dumb chemist wannabe question… by passing a more reactive gas like chlorine through a bromine-salt solution, will that cause free bromine to “precipitate” out of solution, or will the bromine be driven off as an evaporate since it is also so volatile?

Sorry, I hope I’m not wasting your time.

Ken Nelson

[Mercury]

Hello Jon,

No worries. Every one of us in the dome those nights were newborns, so to speak. You’d have been right at home!

Mr. Gellerman’s “All Things Considered” segment aired on August 3, 1985, as segment no. 850803.

Chemical management was pretty easy. Since it was night, all we had to do was turn off the white lights in the dome for sensitizing. We had a portable red safelight nearby. My sensitizing boxes release such a tiny amount with each slide that we never smelled it, and iodine and bromine are odious at infinitesimal levels. The vast space of air in the dome (and the huge opening for the telescope) dissipated it immediately. As can be seen from the photos in the article, we did have my portable fume hood in the dome for the mercury pot, which was vented directly to the outdoors through a port hole in the building.

Glad you got your copy of “Astronomy” so quickly! And I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I just re-read it myself a few days ago and was transported. Susan and Jan did a wonderful job. I’m sitting here in Seattle (of all places for this weather) on the same kind of clear, hot, sticky, sultry night, looking at the same kind of reddish 3/4 moon that we looked at all those years ago. All I need are 4 crazy friends and a big telescope and the illusion is complete…

[Mercury]

Thank you Larry, I’ll give that a try. I first met Lynne in 1981 when she was a conservator at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. I love it when that six degrees thing works.

Andy, thanks! I guess at this point I’m old enough to be historical. This renaissance is wild beyond ANYTHING I could have envisioned when I started making daguerreotypes in 1976… then, one could practically count the world’s active daguerreians on two hands. Aside from the work with our little Lunar Daguerreian Society in the 80’s, I have not done any other astronomical daguerreotypy. Given that,

Answers: 1) Yes. I would recommend a telescope with a quality auto-tracking mechanism. As I understand it, there are ones that can track both the stars and the moon (which is a more complex job because of it’s orbital path) which are within reasonable financial limits. When Ted Rafferty tracked the moon for our first successful six minute exposure, he did it with the spotting scope on the 12-inch refractor that was powerful enough in itself to see lunar features only a mile or two across.

Bob Shlaer described his outfit, which he used to produce lunar daguerreotypes much better than ours, in the 1991 Daguerreian Annual. I wonder if it would be possible to republish it here?

2) We used bromine-accelerated plates and Hg. We were working at a time when Becquerel was regarded as very slow. Good work by many people starting with Gerry Megan’s revolution might bring Becquerel plates “up to speed” for lunar work, but I’m not the person to ask. Mercury’s been in my veins since 1976 (not literally of course), I never explored Becquerel process.

[Mercury]

Hello Jon,

Looks like this thread is pretty old and may be stale, but I stumbled across it on an unrelated search.

I was a member of that Lunar Daguerreian Society at the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1984-6. Susan Barger and I were the daguerreotypists. Jan K. Herman and Theodore Rafferty were the astromomical team. It was a total blast! We worked like hell very late into many nights, but it lives in my memory like it was yesterday because of the comeraderie and quality of everybody’s input. It remains one of the best experiences of my life. (Bob Shlaer was not involved… he and Susan hadn’t met yet. I was also a catalyst in their meeting in August of 1989, but that is another story.)

The history of the Lunar Daguerreian Society and the results of the First and Second Lunar Daguerreian Symposia were beautifully written by Susan and Jan, and was published as a feature-length article with many illustrations in the October, 1987 issue of “Astronomy” magazine.

During the “Second Lunar Daguerreian Symposium” when we worked with the 24-inch reflector at the USNO, our team of four was joined by Lynne Gilliland, who might be Larry/Botticelli1972’s wife’s co-worker at the Smithsonian. (I’d like to know how Lynne is, and to say Hello.) Lynne turned out to be much more valuable than a spectator and qickly became a welcome member of the team.

This effort was not a class or a workshop. We ourselves were the students, history and technology were our teachers. We did however manage to attract a lot of interest, including radio reporter Bruce Gellerman (working with US National Public Radio) who capped the First Lunar Daguerreian Symposium, complete with our frustrations and enthusiasm, in a feature segment on NPR’s flagship “All Things Considered” broadcast.

Heady days, well actually nights, indeed.

Ken Nelson

p.s. I’ve done a few experiments with diffraction gratings in direct contact with a daguereotype plate… I’ll see if I can find them. (On the hopeful side, I NEVER throw anything away. On the down-side, I never throw ANYTHING away.)

[Mercury]

Hello all, time to jump in to the soup!

 

I’m Kenneth Nelson, and I’ve only been making daguerreotypes for 33 years or so. As an Old Fart, I’m thrilled to see this new “revival” and the quality of work I see on CDAGS. Let s ALL give Marc Kereun MORE THAN HE CAN HANDLE for the show in Bry-sur-Marne!

 

I respectfully submit to CDAGS the portfolio I sent to Marc. These images will probably not come through as titled, but represent a tiny cross-section of my work between 1977 and 2008.

 

Thank you all for looking.

 

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[Mercury]

Thanks Rob, Malinkrodt is being very cooperative, doing everything they can to get the bromine water to Project Basho in time.

CDags works! That’s all, folks. I think we can close this thread.

KN

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