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Archive of the Construction of the Santa Ana Canal

Currency:USD Category:Western Americana Start Price:1,250.00 USD Estimated At:2,500.00 - 7,500.00 USD
Archive of the Construction of the Santa Ana Canal
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This spectacular and rare collection of original "blue toned" photographs deals with the construction of the Santa Ana Canal, an early L. A. aqueduct. Most are labelled on the back, many duplicates. Iron toners are capable of subtle or deep blue tones. That the salts of iron are light-sensitive. Salts of Iron. i.e., susceptible to chemical change when exposed to light, seems to have been known to chemists as early as 1725v . In 1842 Sir John Herschel was not only the first to make known the principle upon which the photographic uses of the iron salts depend, but he also worked out and published several iron printing methods, one of which (the ferro-prussiate or familiar " blue" process) is worked to-day just as he described it sixty years ago. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide. Apart from its color possibilities, the blue print is like other prints-- sepia tone, for instance. It possesses an abundant capacity for giving detail, and a wide range of tone from light to dark. The blue print introduces us to a very interesting group of photographic printing processes based on the light-sensitiveness of certain salts of iron* (ferric salts). (Prag Collection)











City: Santa Ana
State: California
Date: 1893
HWAC#: : 30736