After having been "away from photography" the last twenty years or so, I find much knowledge in this field has changed likely due to incomplete reporting or research that people do before posting articles on the internet.
What's your favorite (or most frustrating) falsehood(s) reported on photography?
Some of mine are:
1. Misunderstandings on the history of black and white film color sensitivity. So many think that the first films were orthochromatic, completely forgetting the color blind (blue sensitive) emulsions of early photography. Was it Vogel that first reported orthochromatic film sensitizers? Was this incomplete research or poor Google searches? Searches yield the most common, not the best or more complete information often.
2. Misunderstandings on what an emulsion is. So many videos and articles on alternate printing processes refer to the paper sensitizing solutions as emulsions even though they are water plus ionic solids only with no emulsifying agents. This may be a minor thing, but kind of irritating.
3. George Eastman was the inventor of roll film. I guess he was one of the inventors, but Hannibal Goodwin held the first patent, which was bought by Ansco, who sued Eastman Kodak for patent infringement on roll film and won the largest settlement in history at that time nearly 30 years after the invention. It was litigated that long. This is one of those little irritating historical things. Eastman and Goodwin both invented roll film at about the same time independently, but Goodwin filed a patent and Eastman did not. Goodwin was an elder preacher and amateur photographer of modest means while George Eastman was economically more successful. Goodwin died many years before the court case was settled.
This film resurgence thing is great, but we need to keep the internet fact-checkers employed. Please add to this your own list of mis-remembered parts of photo technology and history.
Alan Townsend
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