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Dancing Naked on the Head of a Pin: The Early History of Microphotography
In 1853, John Benjamin Dancer achieved a feat of seemingly impossible scale: he shrunk an image to the size of a sharpened pencil tip. Anika Burgess explores the invention of microphotography and its influence on erotic paraphernalia and military communications.
Views at various scales of John Benjamin Dancer’s first commercial microphotograph, a reproduction of the English inventor William Sturgeon’s memorial tablet, in which he reduced a four-foot-wide image to less than two millimetres, signing it with his name and “Manchester” — Source. In one, the article continued, “the case was detained for examination, and was found to contain, amongst other articles, a packet of watch-keys each containing a diminutive photograph with magnifying power, which, upon being held close to the eye, represented the most obscene and disgusting pictures.” Customs laws prohibited any importation of “obscene and indecent pictures”, though a letter written into the Adelaide Observer that same month makes clear that it was not uncommon: “I happen to know of some similar goods having been imported some time ago”, the author wrote, advocating “a strong effort to prevent such an abominable trade”. “Microscopic copies of despatches and valuable papers and plans might be transmitted by post”, Brewster wrote prophetically, adding, “and secrets might be placed in spaces not larger than a full stop or a small blot of ink.”
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