Today’s delayed-from-yesterday Monday Mystery revolves around a medal awarded to a man named Plumbe. Professor Plumbe, to be exact.  And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with the game of Clue. 

By way of introduction to our story, allow me first to mention that the Library of Congress (LOC)  recently digitized newspapers from 1832-1920 and made them freely available on the web. Chris then had the clever idea to make an improved search page for our own use, which makes it easier to find notices (advertisements, articles, etc.) in those (mostly 19th century) newspapers papers that refer to photography. And photographers. My main impetus behind this is to find references to the female photographers, since they are the focus of my current project (working title is still Photographs, Pistols and Parasols, BTW — podcast coming soon, I hope).

Anyway, while Chris and I are finding lots of tidbits that relate to my project, we also routinely stumble across intriguing items that aren’t directly related, which is where Professor Plumbe enters our story. You see, one of the newspapers we ran across had a letter to the editor that had a passionate defense of one Professor Plumbe and a gold medal that had been bestowed on him by an American daguerreotype society. The letter was written in response to a previous letter that had appeared in the paper. In the first letter, a man named J.E. Mayall had taken umbrage with an announcement that the newspaper had published saying that  Professor Plumbe had received that medal at a particular conference. Mayall argued that Plumbe had in fact not been awarded a gold — or any other — medal. He further implied that Plumbe was not even that good a photographer in general, but just someone prone to exaggerate his achievements.

But the “defense” response, written on Plumbe’s behalf, argued vigorously that Mayall was completed wrong in this matter. The defender explained that while it was true Professor Plumbe had not won the medal in a contest, he had indeed been awarded a Gold Medal by a select committee at said conference. Therefore, it was entirely true that Plumbe had received a gold medal there. The letter-writer went on to explain further that it had been the someone on  the committee [editor’s note: perhaps the letter-writer himself?] who had sent out the press notices about Plumbe’s medal. Therefore, Plumbe should be seen as entirely blameless in that issue as well.

Wow. Quite the set-down for Mayall.  Indeed, so soundly was his complaint torn apart that Mayall subsequently was compelled to write a retraction, one that included an apology to Professor Plumbe.

Such passion ignited over a photography medal, of all things?! What fun, eh? Photography has been rather racous since it’s inception, I guess. Finding that sequence of letters to the editor was just the tip of the iceberg, though, because it then  raised a bigger question:  who the heck were these people?

It turned out that Professor John Plumbe was an American photographer who opened his first daguerreotype studio, the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery, in Washington, DC. in 1840. Impressive – that’s only one year after Daguerre demonstrated his technology. Plumbe very quickly opened up a bunch of franchise studios all across the U.S.; some of his ads appear in that LOC newspapers online database, so it’s possible to see how big he really was throughout the 1840s.

Of course,  I’m guessing from the size of his operation that he didn’t necessarily do all his own work himself, but rather lent his name to the franchise outlets. Sort of the way Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire opened dance studios but didn’t personally teach at each one, I suppose.  In photography, it wasn’t just Plumbe who had this type of arrangement, although Plumbe seems to have been one of the first.

John J. E. Mayall, however, was a photographer of a different sort. He was an Englishman and daguerreotypist who moved to the U.S. in 1842. He subsequently opened a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia, and I get a sense from what little I’ve read that he was more of an “artist” type of photographer, doing his own work, both in and out of the studio. Plumbe had a studio on the same street in Philadelphia as Mayall,  and I can only speculate how intensely Mayall might have resented Plumbe’s success and popularity, as it would seem that Mayall may have struggled for recognition during his time in Philadelphia.

That’s all to say that it’s interesting to conjecture about what happened after those letters appeared in the paper in 1846. I mean, I can’t prove any actual cause/effect here … but it is interesting to note that Mayall actually sold off his Philadelphia studio in 1846 and moved back to England. Perhaps there was too much public shaming after the kerfuffle about his criticism of Plumbe’s medal? Did that do in Mayall’s Philadelphia business? We may never know …

But we don’t need to feel too sorry for Mayall in the end. After getting back to England, he set up a studio in London, and in the 1850s his print-photography work garnered great acclaim. According to Wikipedia, he even became the first-ever royal photographer, for Queen Victoria and her family.

There’s also a curious item I found in an 1887 newspaper that notes that Mayall had discovered a process for doing color photography. That’s intriguing, as it’s the only mention of it I’ve found. Mayall is not the one traditionally credited for inventing color photography, which isn’t said to have been done until closer to 1900 in any case. That’s fodder for a future Monday Mystery topic, perhaps.

As for Professor Plumbe, well, he operated his extensive studio franchise only until 1848, when he sold them off and turned to working with the railroad. It’s apparently unclear if he ever did photography again.

But from 1840-47, if you wanted to get your photo taken in Washington, DC., you’d probably have headed to the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery in the Concert Hall building.

Yes, that means you would get your photo done by Professor Plumbe — in the Concert Hall — with the camera.

Come to think of it, I guess our intriguing little Monday Mystery does sound a bit like a game of Clue.