Joseph Bancroft Reade
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Joseph Bancroft Reade (1801 - 1870) was an English pioneer of photography. A cleric and a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1838, Reade became interested in photography in 1839 after the announcements by Daguerre and soon after by Talbot. He began experimenting with light-sensitive substances and soon discovered that he could get much better results when the silver salt was applied not to paper but to tanned leather (allegedly, he used his wife's mittens for experiments). Reade conjectured that the difference in sensitivity was caused by gallic acid used for tanning, and indeed by treating paper with gallic acid before soaking it in silver nitrate solution, he could drastically increase the sensitivity.
In 1854, Reade testified at the Talbot v. Laroche trial, where the Laroche side tried to prove that Talbot's patent for calotype was invalid because the use of gallic acid was first discovered by Reade, from whom Talbot learned it. In his testimony, however, Reade upheld Talbot's originality explaining that while he had used gallic acid for preprocessing the light-sensitive paper, Talbot was the first to discover that gallic acid can reveal the latent image in an already exposed paper (i.e. was the first to develop a photographic material).
