John Johnson was an instrument maker of dental supplies. He was a nineteenth-century pioneer photographer and an inventor. He made with Alexander S. Wolcott the world's first commercial portrait studio.
Early life
Johnson was born in Saco, Maine on May 28, 1813. His father was William Short Johnson.
Mid life
Johnson lived his childhood and got his initial schooling in Pembroke, New Hampshire. After high school when a young man he worked for a watchmaker in New York City for a few years. Later he went into a business with Alexander Simon Wolcott, an instrument maker, and they formed a partnership with their photography firm in New York City.
Photography
Johnson took to Wolcott on October 6, 1839, a detailed copy of the specifications on Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre's method of capturing a likeness of a person. Wolcott was familiar with the mechanics of optics and experimented on improving Daguerre's basic methods of using lenses. Wolcott came up with the concept that exposure time could be reduced by an improvement on the mechanical arrangement of the image focusing process. This was by using a concave reflector of a 3–4 inch diameter that produced a short focus length. The focused image was formed onto a chemically treated silver surface that was sensitive to light. The image stored on this chemically treated plate of about 2 by 2.5 inches could hold the picture indefinitely. Wolcott then made a camera that day with improvements on Daguerre's method. The camera was a wooden box 15 inches long, 8.5 inches high, and 8 inches wide. There was a 7-inch concave mirror in the back of the camera. The camera was constructed so that it had a large opening in front where the light rays of the person of the portrait passed through an aperture. The photo-sensitive 2 inch exposure plate was in a detachable frame in the center of this aperture opening, just inside the box. The operator of the camera would set up the focusing of the portrait picture on an unsensitized plate first. Then once the camera was focused with all of the mechanical items involved, then the camera operator would replace the focusing plate with the sensitized plate to take the picture. Photography historians Dr. Robert Taft and Patrick Robertson stated that Wolcott took a picture of Johnson as the first portrait in the world on October 7, 1839. On March 4, 1840, they opened the first studio in the world as a commercial enterprise for taking pictures of people. The customer would sit for their likeness to be captured on a permanent medium for future viewing. The commercial photography studio was located in New York City at Broadway and Chamber Street. Johnson with Wolcott created the world's first photography portrait studio as a business. They opened their commercial daguerreotype photography portrait studio in March 1840. Wolcott's camera technology was taken to London by Johnson's father, William S. Johnson, in February 1840. A European franchise financial arrangement was worked out by W. S. Johnson with Richard Beard, a coal merchant and entrepreneur. They hired John Frederick Goddard, a chemist and lecturer in optics. Goddard came up a chemistry formula to make the image plate sensitive to light so that an image would develop on it much faster than the daguerreotype cameras of the time. The image plate used iodine chloride to make the plates sensitive to light, which helped to shorten the camera exposure time. The concave mirror reflector improvement and the photo-sensitive plate were the key innovative features Wolcott based his 1840 camera invention on that made portraits a possibility. This made exposure time to as low as a few minutes in bright sunlight, and since a person could be still for that long it make portraits possible using this state-of-the-art photography. Beard then opened the first public portrait studio of Europe in London in March 1841, the Daguerrean gallery at the Polytechnic Institute. Beard developed franchises of portrait studios throughout England.
