| Dates: | 1807 - 1890 | | Active: | UK |
Preparing biographies
Born in Bristol but a resident of Cornwall, Jordan was a teacher of painting who was irresistibly drawn to all things mechanical. Already a fine philosophical instrument maker, he became the secretary of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society (Talbot’s uncle, Sir Charles Lemon, was the president). Immediately on the publication of Talbot’s invention of photogenic drawing in 1839, Jordan found a way to combine his two loves, art and science. Part of his duties as secretary was to keep local meteorological records, and in March 1839 he demonstrated his self-registering barometer, a device that used Talbot’s sensitive paper to track an hour-by-hour record; he also invented a heliograph, which kept a daily record of the intensity of the sunlight at Falmouth. In 1840 Jordan moved to London and was replaced as secretary by Robert Hunt, a friend of his who ran a chemist’s shop in Penzance. Hunt soon emerged as the most important historian of early photography and helped to ensure Jordan’s reputation. For his part, Jordan continued as an inventor deeply interested in photographers and photography.
Roger Taylor & Larry J. Schaaf Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 4 Nov 2012.
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