358
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
tion or development, will be glad to know that these conditions are very nearly attained, and that the most difficult part, technically, of the photographic art bids fair to become superseded by trustworthy manufacture for commercial purposes.
Several manufacturers in England now send sensitive plates all over the world, and one of them especially, the "Liverpool Dry Plate Company,” produces them of so great certainty and rapidity of action, that for ordinary uses, and especially for landscape work, they are likely to supersede the common methods of working; while another, a photographer of wide repute, Colonel Stuart Wortley, has perfected a modification of the same dry process, by which plates of great rapidity are produced, and, like the Liverpool plates, may be kept indefinitely.
A scientific expedition starting on a three years’ voyage might carry with it plates enough to suffice for all its purposes, and carry on its operations without any of the inconveniences which travelling photographic laboratories cause.
The advance of commercial activity in this direction is so great, that since the Exhibition has been closed a new facility for scientific photography has been added to its former products by the Liverpool Dry Plate Company, in a preparation containing in a single solution all the elements necessary for photographic results, which retains for an indefinite time all its qualities, and needs only to be applied to the glass and dried to be ready for use.
With the introduction of a successful substitute for glass the commercial preparation of sensitive films, for photographic uses, will become so satisfactory that for all but portrait or other localized practitioners, they will supersede the preparations of the photographers themselves. The importance of these developments of photographic industry to all kinds of scientific research, as well as all branches of pictorial reproduction, cannot fail to strike every one, and there is good reason to hope that the whole of the desiderata above mentioned will soon be attained.
In the English department of the Exhibition there were some frames of landscapes of a very high excellence, and some large heads by Colonel Wortley, all on dry plates ; and