The 9th September is a day of firsts as well as a day of discovery, for me at least. Two firsts separated by 101 years are that on the 9th September, 1839; John Herschel took the first glass plate photograph (Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS (March 7, 1792 – May 11, 1871) was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work. He was the son of Mary Baldwin and astronomer Sir Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel and the father of 12 children. Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays) and; George Stibitz pioneered the first remote operation of a computer (In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 9, 1940, Stibitz used a teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line).
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| Hershel |
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| Stibitz |
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| Julia Cameron 1860 |
I discovered on finding the photograph of Sir John Hershel, that it was taken in 1867 by Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879). She was a British photographer and became known for her portraits of celebrities of her time, as well as for photographs with an Arthurian or other legendary theme. Her career was short, spanning eleven years of her life, from 1864 to 1875. She took up photography at the age of 48 when given a camera as a present. Here are three of her pictures:
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| "Annie, my first success", 29 January 1864. Cameron's first print she was satisfied with |
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Ellen Terry photographed in 1864 by Julia Margaret Cameron |
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Cameron portrait of Julia Prinsep Jackson, later Julia Stephen, Cameron's niece, favourite subject, and mother of the author Virginia Wolf. |
And a photograph of herself, taken by her youngest son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron in 1870;
There is more stuff to be found out about this woman, and the art of the glass plate photograph. That first photograph on the 9th of September 1839 and the gift of the camera to Julia Cameron was quite an achievement.
There are further discoveries. Exactly 100 years before that glass plate, on the 9th September 1739, the largest slave uprising in Britain’s mainland North American colonies prior to the American Revolution, erupted near Charleston, South Carolina.
The Stono Rebellion (sometimes called Cato's Conspiracy or Cato's Rebellion) was a slave rebellion that commenced on 9 September 1739. One of the earliest known organized rebellions in the present United States, it was led by native African who were Catholic and likely from the kingdom of the Kongo, and some of whom spoke Portuguese. Jemmy (referred to in some reports as "Cato" – Jemmy was probably a slave belonging to the Cato, or Cater, family who lived just off the Ashley River and north of the Stono River) was a literate slave who led 20 other enslaved Kongolese, who may have been former soldiers, in an armed march south from the Stono River (for which the rebellion is named). They recruited nearly 60 other slaves and killed 22–25 whites before being intercepted by a South Carolina militia near the Edisto River. In that battle, 20 whites and 44 slaves were killed, and the rebellion was suppressed. A group of slaves escaped and traveled another 30 miles (50 km) before battling a week later with a militia; most of the slaves were executed; a few survived to be sold to the West Indies.
The above information comes from a series of articles on North American Slave Revolts of which there were many. One such revolt was the 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation. This was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur in the Cherokee Nation. The slave revolt took place on November 15, 1842, when a group of African-American slaves owned by the Cherokee escaped and tried to reach Mexico, where slavery had been outlawed. They were soon captured. However, at one point the escapees had killed two pursuers, for which five of them were to be later executed. I must confess I had no knowledge that the Cherokee bought and kept slaves. It appears that prior to European contact, the Cherokee had been cultivating wealth from the practice of making slaves of prisoners of war from other Indian tribes. In the late 18th century, there were Cherokee-owned plantations set up on Cherokee Nation land in Georgia and Tennessee. In 1819, the Cherokee Nation passed slave codes that regulated slave trade; forbade intermarriage; enumerated punishment for runaway slaves; and prohibited slaves from owning private property. An example of the consequences of one slave code, passed in 1820, dictated that anyone who traded with a slave without his owner’s permission was bound to the legal owner for the property, or its value, if the property traded proved to be stolen. Another code declared that a fine of fifteen dollars was to be levied for masters who allowed slaves to buy or sell liquor.
There is clearly more to be discovered here.
On a more literary note, in looking into the Cherokee language, I found that it was only created into a written form in 1821 by a Cherokee called Sequoyah. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of an illiterate people independently created an effective writing system. After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate rapidly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.
We should not underestimate the value of a writing system, nor the importance and effects of that first remote operation of a computer. One system leads to another. What is this need or desire to record and disseminate information?
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