James Ambrose Cutting was an American inventot. He spent his life trying to innovate the process of photography taking, experimenting in several directions. But most of his inventions were granted with patent only for certain details. These patents were of very little value to him, as he was not entitled to the inventions.
Background
James Ambrose Cutting was born in 1814 in the village of Hanover, Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. He was the son of Abijah Cutting, a descendant of a seventeenth-century English immigrant who settled in the central portion of what is now the state of New Hampshire, Shortly after his birth his parents moved to Haverhill, New Hampshire, United States, where the family lived in straitened circumstances for a great many years, presumably as farmers.
Career
It would seem that young Cutting was interested in bee-keeping to the extent of consistently trying to improve the type of hive then in use.
He eventually succeeded and on June 24, 1844, received United States Patent No. 3, 638 for a beehive.
Armed with his patent, Cutting proceeded to engage in the manufacture of his hive and apparently experienced partial financial success during the succeeding decade. It is said, however, that before the end of this period he was again made destitute through poor investments. Lie next became interested in photography, the daguerreotype then being in vogue.
He is first heard of in this connection in April 1854 through correspondence with the Commissioner of Patents in Washington relative to his application for patents on improvements in the collodion process of photography. The broad claims made by him in the original application were rejected because the process was not new, but for certain details of the process, patents numbered 11, 213, 11, 266, and 11, 267 were eventually granted in July 1854.
In one of these he styled his process “ambrotype, ” from the Greek word ambrotos, meaning immortal, his claim being that by his process greater per-Cuyler manency of picture was secured than otherwise. The same month a British patent was granted him. Although Cutting is said to have enjoyed considerable prosperity for a time, it seems probable that these patents were of very little value to him, for the commercial photographers of the day were universally of the feeling that he was not entitled to the inventions, and accordingly paid very little regard to them. Cutting continued to reside in Boston engaging in photographic work and apparently experimenting in several allied directions, for on March 16, 1858, he, with L. H. Bradford of Boston, received Patent No. 19, 626 for a photolithographic process.
This invention seems to have had some merit, for five years after Cutting’s death his administrator, A. O. Butman, and Bradford obtained from the Patent Office an extension of the original patent. Cutting’s name appears in the Boston city directories until 1862, when, because of his weakened mental state, he was committed to a lunatic asylum at Worcester, where he died five years later.