Background
Paul Beck Goddard was born on January 26, 1811, in Baltimore, Maryland.
anatomist Photographer physician
Paul Beck Goddard was born on January 26, 1811, in Baltimore, Maryland.
After his graduation from Washington (Trinity) College, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1828, Paul entered the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received the degree of M. D. in 1832.
Goddard settled in Philadelphia, where he practiced his profession for a time but subsequently became an assistant to Dr. Robert Hare, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.
Later, he was a professor of anatomy in the medical department of the same institution. While he was assistant to Hare, news was received of Daguerre’s discovery that pictures could be produced with the sun and a sensitized plate as the agents.
Goddard at once began to take a deep interest in the experiments being made in the new art. The slowness of Daguerre’s method caused many failures in the experiments, and finally, Goddard discovered that by using the vapor of bromide on the silvered plate the process could be much accelerated. This discovery, which was the basis of all future progress in the photographic art, he described before the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, in December 1839, exhibiting some of his results.
He died in Philadelphia, in 1866, and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.
Goddard pioneered indoor and portrait photography in the 1840s. While on the staff of the University of Pennsylvania, he discovered that the exposure of a daguerreotype's iodine-sensitized silver plate to the vapor of bromine permitted realistic portraits to be taken with exposure times of under a minute. During the Civil War, he was commissioned Major and Surgeon, US Volunteers on October 4, 1862, and directed one of the US Army Medical Hospitals in Philadelphia. Goddard published many medical works.
Goddard's claims to the discovery of bromine as a photographic agent have been ignored by some British writers on the subject, and the credit erroneously given to John Frederick Goddard, a London optician who made, independently, the same discovery and announced it December 12, 1840, in the Literary Gazette of London.
In 1840, Goddard was made a member of the Society.
Quotes from others about the person
Describing Goddard’s work, Julius F. Sachse said in a lecture before the Franklin Institute: “It was this discovery which solved the question of time exposure, perfecting Daguerre’s process and thereby making possible its universal application in the various arts and sciences. . .. It was during this series of experiments with bromine that Doctor Goddard succeeded in obtaining several good views instantaneously in the open air, which were the first instantaneous pictures ever made by the heliographic process”.
Goddard was married to Louisa Bonsall.
