Extractive operations : copper and the photographic image

The daguerreotype precedes the periodic table by thirty years. Yet even before Louis Daguerre coated copper plates with silver to produce the polished surface necessary for this early photographic technology, these elements were associated with one another as coinage metals. Dimitri Mendeleev's 1869 periodic table grouped copper not only with silver and gold but also with elements such as lithium, potassium, and rubidium. Only with Henry Moseley's 1913 redesign of the periodic table would copper be isolated into group eleven with silver and gold, and later, in 1994, the synthetic element roentgenium. This repositioning reflected a new approach to the elements based on experimental observation and objective measurement of their physical properties and atomic structures. Moseley's innovation collocated three of the most stable, naturally occurring elements, probably among the first discovered. That these metals, particularly copper and silver, should play a prominent role in photography's history is no accident. Their integration into circuits of capitalist exchange and production linked them to conduits of extraction and supply with a shifting global reach. If these channels were initially sustained by currency circulation, the 19th century saw them increasingly joined to industrial application.