James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, Picture map of the moon Plate

Plate number V from “The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite”

James Nasmyth's Photographic Images of the Moon Frances Robertson Glasgow School of Art Having made his fortune as an industrialist and inventor with his Bridgewater Foundry in Manchester, the mechanical engineer James Nasmyth was able to retire in his late forties, in 1856, in order to devote himself to his longstanding passion for astronomy. His main astronomical project, from 1842, had been a sustained series of lunar observations, culminating in his publication The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (Nasmyth and Carpenter).
Among the reasons Nasmyth's book is noteworthy is that it was one of the first books to be illustrated by photo-mechanical prints. This new technique allowed photographs to be published through standard industrial print processes using permanent carbon-based inks, and represented a significant improvement upon the more laborious and fugitive silver-chemistry darkroom processes used in the earliest books with photographic illustrations. In photo-mechanical printing, light is used to prepare printing surfaces: because the process can be applied to both photographic and line originals (Woodbury).

Photo ID: 2388