Effigy of Sir Walter Scott's Favorite Dog Maida by the Side of the Hall Door at Abbotsford

Although daguerreotypes are often thought to be the earliest form of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot’s salted paper prints were invented around the same time and had a much larger influence on future photographic developments. In the early 1830s, Talbot began experimenting with paper that had been sensitized with a coating of table salt (sodium chloride) dissolved in water, followed by a layer of silver nitrate. He created “salt prints” by placing objects on the coated paper and exposing it to sunlight for several hours. The process created a negative print on the paper, and Talbot soon realized that he could print the negative back onto a newly sensitized sheet to make a positive print, allowing for the possibility of infinite reproductions. In 1841, Talbot patented the calotype, which had an additional layer of potassium iodide after the layer of silver nitrate. This image is one of the first photographic representations of an animal, albeit a statue. While the calotype process reduced exposure times to around eight seconds, a photograph of a live dog would have been impossible at the time, rendered only as a blur.