Background
Charles Harper Bennett was born in 1840 in Langdale Lodge, Clapham Park, London, United Kingdom. The son of a wealthy hat manufacturer.
Charles Harper Bennett was born in 1840 in Langdale Lodge, Clapham Park, London, United Kingdom. The son of a wealthy hat manufacturer.
He attended King's College School in London, and later studied medicine.
His chemical experiments in photography resulted in production of a rapid gelatin dry plate, which he showed to the South London Photographic Society on March 7, 1878, along with a negative of a room interior taken by gaslight. Later that month he published a description of his method for increasing the speed of gelatin emulsion, a technique exceedingly important in the later development of modem emulsions and snapshot photography. Bennett did not patent his discovery. He later outlined conditions for eliminating fog in fast gelatin dry plates. After his father's death, Bennett settled in Australia (1894).