began to reflect on the camera obscura  and wrote that “it was 
during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me . . . how 
charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural 
images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed on 
paper!” The printing press had, in the Renaissance, inspired a 
similar desire to give permanence to daily feelings and 
experience.

     The method Talbot devised was that of printing positives 
chemically from negatives, to yield an exactly repeatable image. 
Thus the roadblock that had impeded the Greek botanists and 
had defeated their successors was removed. Most of the 
sciences had been, from their origins, utterly handicapped by 
the lack of adequate nonverbal means of transmitting 
information. Today, even subatomic physics would be unable to 
develop without the photograph.