John Herschel coined the word photography on February 28, 1839 in a letter to Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot was a painter turned inventor who had an early photographic process. The problem was the images faded too quickly. He enlisted John Herschel (Herschel's father and aunt were rather famous too) for help with good results. Then Talbot caught wind of work by Louis Degurre and wanted to claim his (and Herschel's) place. He wrote to Herschel proposing a name that could be used in a scientific paper. Herschel understood the power of a name.
In a letter of February 28, 1839, Herschel objected to the term “photogeny” to describe Talbot’s new image-making process, noting that it “recalls Van Mons’s exploded theories of thermogen & photogen.” This associative defect, Herschel argued, is amplified by the word’s poetic deficiencies: “It also lends itself to no inflexions & is not analogous with Litho & Chalcography.” Instead, Herschel proposed “photography.” On March 12, he read before the Royal Society a paper titled “Note on the Art of Photography or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation” — the first public utterance of the word photography.
- Figuring by Mary Popova