A small object witrh a big surprise. ROBERT GALLOWAY LRPS

A small object containing a big surprise

A small piece of ornamentally carved bone, was found beside the 19th Century piece of souvenir Mauchlineware which I described in the January 2019 issue of Heritage Photography, pp 20-21. At a glance the piece of bone does not seem of much interest. ROBERT GALLOWAY, LRPS

The small rod of bone, 73mm long and about 9mm in diameter. The rough left-hand end could perhaps be due to having been broken off some small object. It is decorated along its length with holes through the rod forming part of the decoration. The right-hand end is terminated by a sphere 9mm in diameter with a 3mm diameter hole through it which is filled by a glass rod. This glass rod is 9mm long, flat and white at one end and markedly convex at the other. Herein is the big surprise!

However, hold the object up to the sky (a bright light source), look through the convex end of the little glass rod in the bone sphere and behold a group of photographs! What have we here? Something that I have neither seen nor heard of before. A search of the Web indicates that the little glass rod containing tiny photographs and with convex magnifying end is known as a Stanhope. How old is it? There are some clues in the photograph on the next page. The top right-hand photo. is captioned, “the new University” which was built on Gilmorehill and completed in 1870. Consequently, the Stanhope cannot be older than 1870. The lower left-hand photo. Is captioned ”Georges Square”; one side of George Square now comprises the very impressive Victorian Glasgow City Chambers completed in 1888, which would surely have been included in the Stanhope photo. had they existed when it was taken. This suggests that the Stanhope is older than 1888. The prominent period of Stanhope production was the second half of the 19th century. As to who made it, there is a name in a curvaceous script which begins, “Mc “ but beyond that I have been unable to decipher either from my photographs or from direct viewing by eye. A brief history of Stanhopes see references for links at the end of this piece. The story begins in 1839 when John Benjamin Dancer devised a way of making microphotographs only about 3mm2 in size, so small as to require a microscope to see them. He used them to show how good were the microscopes which he sold! In 1857 Rene Dagron saw the commercial possibility of a small simple device which contained both microphotographs and optical magnification to enable them to be seen. For the optical magnification he made a miniature version of the “one piece microscope” invented about 50 years earlier by Charles, the third Earl of Stanhope and Dagron’s novelties became known as ”Stanhopes”. In 1862 Dagron is said to have had 150 workers in his factory. Concerning photographing the images in the Stanhope. It has been noted that the photographing of Stanhope images is “arduous” and that a microscope has been used; I agree with “arduous” but I was not helped by my microscope, possibly because its minimum magnification 40x is

What is seen looking through the convex end of the little glass rod. Note that the eye must be within 10mm of the convex end to see this and what is seen is contained within 3mm diameter in the glass tube. I found this very difficult to photograph, but more about that later.

The arrangement used to produce photo.2. An LED light panel was placed on a desk shining upwards with a small sheet of opal glass on top to provide an area of uniform illumination on which the Stanhope in the bone holder could be placed as required. The iphone was held securely only just above the Stanhope using a phone-tripod clamp on a sturdy tripod.

too high. The photographic problem is to record what is contained within only a 3mm diameter in the Stanhope and can only be viewed through the convex end of the little glass rod. When viewed directly by eye the image looks much brighter, just as a photographic transparency commonly is much brighter than a print made from it. My first attempts were made with interchangeable lens cameras with various lenses and combinations of lenses that I had used for macro work. The results were a complete failure, at best showing a dark blur in a circle of light. Realising that the eye has to be only a few mm from the convex lens end of the glass rod, this closeness could not be replicated with typical interchangeable lenses which have their front element recessed into the lens mount by several cm. To get the Stanhope close to a camera lens and so resemble direct eye viewing, I tried my compact camera with which the Stanhope to camera lens separation could be about 10mm. This was encouraging but not yet good enough; the resulting photos showed only about 2/3 of the complete image and were so unsharp that that none of the captions or text could be read. It seemed necessary to lessen the separation between Stanhope and camera lens. An iphone camera lens must be very close to the rear surface of the iphone and seemed worth a try and indeed produced photo.2 using the arrangement shown in photo.3. The wide angle lens on an iphone 7+ was used and gave an image 4032x3024 pixels which was processed in Lightroom to black and white (as were the original Stanhope images), cropped to remove irrelevant background as in photo.2 (2102x2021 pixels) and given an application of “clarity”.

References

en.wilkipedia.org/wiki/Stanhope_(optical_bijou) www.collectiblescoach.com/2013/11/stanhopecollecting-guide.html Hunter Oatman-Stanford, Royalty, Espionage, and Erotica: Secrets of the World’s Tiniest Photographs (https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/secretsof-the-worlds-tiniest-photographs/) University of Glasgow Old and New, https://www. gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/ month/july2008.html Glasgow City Chambers, https://en.wilkipedia.org/ wiki/Glasgow_City_Chambers Stanhope lens, hpps://en.wilkipedia.org/wiki/ Stanhope_lens