5.2.1: Elizabeth Fulhame

A Forgotten Chemist of Photographic Possibility

In the annals of photographic prehistory, Elizabeth Fulhame (pronounced fuhl-HAYM) (fl. 1780s–1790s) stands out as a remarkable yet largely overlooked figure. A British chemist and experimentalist, Fulhame was among the first to articulate how light might be used to create images through chemical change—decades before photography was officially invented. Her groundbreaking work offered a theoretical and practical foundation for later experiments in photochemistry and, significantly, challenged prevailing assumptions about women's roles in science during the Enlightenment.

In 1794, Fulhame published her only known work, An Essay on Combustion, with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, in which she described experiments involving the reduction of metallic salts using hydrogen gas in the presence of light. While her focus was initially on textile dyeing and metallic plating, her observations included the use of silver salts—a key component of later photographic processes. Notably, she reported that light could influence and accelerate chemical reactions, especially in the reduction of silver, copper, and gold salts to their metallic states on fabrics and paper surfaces.¹

Fulhame’s methodology was rigorous. She tested various combinations of chemicals, including silver nitrate, under controlled conditions with and without the presence of light. Through this careful experimentation, she was able to deduce that light played an active role in altering certain chemical compounds. This insight was essential to the eventual development of photographic emulsions.² Although Fulhame never proposed using light to form images per se, her work clearly revealed the potential for light-sensitive materials to be employed in representational or recording systems.

What makes Fulhame especially notable is not just her contributions to early chemistry, but the fact that she was a woman publishing serious scientific research at a time when such work by women was exceedingly rare. In her own words, Fulhame acknowledged the skepticism she expected from her male contemporaries: “But censure is perhaps inevitable; for some are so ignorant, that they grow sullen and silent, and are chilled with horror at the sight of any thing that bears the semblance of learning, in whatever shape it may appear: and should the spectre appear in the shape of a woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.”³

Though largely uncredited by the photographic inventors who followed her, Fulhame’s essay was known to early 19th-century chemists, and her insights into photochemical reduction certainly circulated within the broader scientific community. Her work predates that of Johann Heinrich Schulze, Thomas Wedgwood, and Humphry Davy in its articulation of light’s role in chemical change.⁴ Today, scholars increasingly recognize Fulhame as a proto-photographic thinker, whose experiments mark an essential but forgotten step on the road toward photography.

Footnotes

1. Elizabeth Fulhame, An Essay on Combustion, with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting (London: J. Cooper, 1794), pp. 27–36.
2. Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 15.
3. Fulhame, An Essay on Combustion, p. iv (Preface).
4. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 12.