Frederic Eugene Ives: The Man Who Changed the Printing World

In this installment of ‘Profiles in History,’ we meet a self-educated photography enthusiast who experimented his way to changing the industry of print media.
Frederic Eugene Ives: The Man Who Changed the Printing World
Frederic Eugene Ives (L) invented the halftone process, used in this reproduction of "Whistler's Mother." Public Domain
Dustin Bass
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Born on a small farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, Frederic Eugene Ives (1856–1937) had an appreciation for the natural beauty around him. When Ives was young, his father took over a general store in Norfolk, Connecticut, just north of Litchfield. Ives’s schooling was intermittent at best. When his father died shortly before his 12th birthday, his formal education ended. Without the means for schooling, Ives entered the workforce around age 13, but believed he could educate himself just as well. His perseverance in this matter would significantly contribute to the industry of information and media.

Ives’ self-education was founded on three things: his love of nature, a cheap microscope, and an old textbook on the subject of nature. It seemed that Ives was on the road to becoming a naturalist, but his passion was for visuals, and he set his sights on photography.

Getting an Early Start

In 1870, he became a printer’s apprentice at the Litchfield Enquirer newspaper, where he spent three years. During this time, Ives began experimenting with photography. With a “spectacle” lens and the body of the camera made from a cigar box, the young apprentice studied the wet-collodion process, also known as the wet-plate process. This process, invented in 1851 by British inventor Frederick Scott Archer, required covering a glass plate with a mixture of collodion and potassium iodide, dipping it into silver nitrate, and then exposing the wet plate inside the camera.
Dustin Bass
Dustin Bass
Author
Dustin Bass is the creator and host of the American Tales podcast, and co-founder of The Sons of History. He writes two weekly series for The Epoch Times: Profiles in History and This Week in History. He is also an author.