Pictured at full gallop
QUESTION
In the early days of photography, exposure took 20 minutes. Who was the first to capture wildlife on film?
In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented a way to create a permanent image using a camera. The daguerreotype was a direct-positive process creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver, without the use of a negative.
While the first daguerreotypes did require the subject to remain still for 15 to 30 minutes, this was quickly improved upon. By 1842, the British chemist John Frederick Goddard had reduced the exposure time to 60 seconds.
A minute is still a long time to sit still and animals proved to be especially challenging subjects because even slight movements caused noticeable blurring.
French photographer and traveller Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey made the earliest surviving daguerreotypes of Greece, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Turkey.
He stopped in Rome on a Mediterranean journey from April to July 1842 and took pictures of cows reclining beside the carts they pulled to market — the earliest known animal portraits.
Another well-known early example was Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s 1845 study of a white foal.
Stereograph images are two nearly identical prints made with a double-lens camera, which are pasted side by side on a card. When viewed through a stereoscope, the two prints combine to create the illusion of 3D.
Photographer Frank Haes made a reputation for himself with his stereographs of exotic beasts at London Zoo in the 1860s and 1870s.
In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by the U.S. politician, railroad tycoon and racehorse owner Leland Stanford to photograph a horse in motion.
His famous set of pictures resolves the question of the position of a horse’s legs during a gallop, specifically, whether all four hooves are off the ground at the same time. They are when the hind legs swing near the front legs, but not, as you may expect, when the legs are outstretched.
Photographing animals in their natural habitats was a major challenge until the late 19th century, when faster film and compact cameras came on the market.
Congressman George Shiras III is called the father of wildlife photography. In 1889, he became the first to use camera traps — remotely activated with a motion sensor — and flash photography when photographing animals.
In July 1906, the national Geographic Society dedicated an entire issue to his stunning wildlife photographs of a lynx, porcupine, raccoon, grizzly bear, snowy owl, moose and three bolting white-tailed deer in their natural settings.
Within two years, such photo essays helped national Geographic grow nearly seven-fold, reaching 20,000 subscribers.
Today, crittercams — cameras attached to an animal to study behaviour in the wild — are so light that they can be used on fish. Camera traps can be set up for months at a time, capturing hundreds of thousands of photos.
Martin Joseph, Wolverhampton, W. Mids.
QUESTION
Did Graham Greene once win a prize for parodying his own style?
In MAY 1949, the literary journalist Walter Allen set the new Statesman weekend competition no. 999, which offered a prize of one guinea for the best imitation or parody of the opening lines of a novel by any writer named Green or Greene.
A certain n. Wilkinson’s entry entitled The Stranger’s Hand: An Entertainment began: ‘The child had an air of taking everything in and giving nothing away.
‘At Rome airport he was led across the Tarmac by his aunt, but he seemed to hear nothing of her advice. He was too busy with his eyes: the hangars had his attention, every lane on the field except his own — that could wait.’
The wise and cynical hero on the brink of a journey, the strained family relations — the hallmarks of novelist Graham Greene’s suspenseful output had been captured by the satirist.
It turned out Mr Wilkinson was more than acquainted with the work of the acclaimed novelist, playwright, film screenwriter and critic — it was a pseudonym for Greene himself. For his efforts, he secured a creditable second place in the competition.
These opening lines were not discarded. They were developed into the film The Stranger’s Hand, directed by Mario Soldati in 1954 and set in post-war Venice.
The thriller starred Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, the lead actors of Greene’s 1949 classic The Third Man.
The plot featured two nefarious yugoslav agents kidnapping a British officer. It was released just when Marshal Tito of yugoslavia split with the Soviet Union, making him popular in the West. The film failed at the box office.
Caroline Marshall, Mold, Flintshire.
QUESTION
If all the gold in existence was melted down into a cube, what would be its size and weight?
GOLD FIELDS Mineral Services (GFMS) is a research and consultancy company for the precious metal markets. It is best known for the annual Gold Survey.
Last year, it calculated that 197,575 tonnes of gold has been mined throughout history, of which two-thirds has been mined since 1950.
This was broken down into 92,947 tonnes (47 per cent) in jewellery; 42,619 tonnes (21.6 per cent) held as private investment; 33,919 tonnes (17.2 per cent) in official/government holdings; and 28,090 tonnes (14.2 per cent) described as other.
If all of this gold was combined, the resulting cube would have sides measuring 71.2 ft.
It has been calculated there are 54,000 tonnes of gold reserves below ground. Each year, gold mining extracts between 2,500 and 3,000 tonnes. This means there are at best 20 years of extraction left.
S. Singh, Luton, Beds.
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