Shadow writing

This technique for creating photographic images without a camera was pioneered by Wedgwood and Davy as early as the 1790s. It's believed that Wedgwood and Davy failed to find any means of fixing the images they made, which meant that the continued reaction of the chemicals to light eventually erased the images entirely. However, there's some evidence that images they produced did in fact survive until the late 19th Century - which would mean that they achieved a fix after all.

But it's W.H. Fox Talbot who is most associated with this method of producing photographic images. He called his process "sciagraphy" or "shadow writing" and used saline solutions both to photosensitize paper and to fix the images he produced.

Imagine a world before photography. The only pictures most people would ever see were paintings - largely the preserve of institutions and of the wealthy - and print illustrations. Those with the resources could commission portrait painters but most people had no images of their loved ones, no snapshots of their childhood, no visual record whatsoever of their experiences.

That chemistry and sunlight could capture images of real objects must have seemed a lot like magic, even to a scientist like Talbot.

It still seems like magic today.