Midley history of early photography due to close early 2010

[Michael Pritchard]

R. Derek Wood published a series of important and carefully researched papers between 1970 and 2008 on early photographic history. His interests lay mainly in the early pioneers of photography, with a focus on dioramas and early experiments between 1830 and 1850 including William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre and topics such as patents. His website http://www.midley.co.uk/ collated these papers and made them available, alongside unpublished correspondence and a few items that never reached printed publication.

Sadly, his website is due to close early in 2010 and Wood is encouraging researchers to made a note of where the original papers were published. Much of the material is available as PDFs and purely for research purposes it may be worth taking a look at the site and making a copies of relevant material before it disappears. As Wood notes "Midley History of early Photography will be preserved online to some extent as it has been automatically archived at the 'Wayback Machine' at http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.midley.co.uk and (for individual files that might be missing from the chronological presentation of the whole site) at web.archive.org/*/www.midley.co.uk/* ). The earlier site (originally at www,midleykent.fsnet.co.uk from July 2001-Jan 2007) is also archived online at web.archive.org The author has also archived onto CD the full site as at 1 March 2009"

The site is highly recommended. Visit while it remains.