William Henry Fox Talbot, who was born in 1800, was a pioneer of photography, a philosopher, a classicist, Egyptologist, mathematician and physicist.

Between 1834 and 1850 established in principle and practice the foundation of modern photography.

This remains the basis of the process that is used today: the negative/positive process.

Fox Talbot facts

• Fox Talbot created the earliest paper negative in existence when he captured the image of the Oriel Window at his home in Lacock Abbey, 1835.

• His ground breaking contribution to photography is best summed up in his own modest statement about his work:

• "…I do not profess to have perfected an art but to have commenced one, the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain. I only claim to have based this art on a secure foundation."

• "It will be for a more skilled hand than mine to rear the superstructure."

• All texts and images printed in books, magazines and newspapers or on posters are transformed and translated through Fox Talbot's invention of the negative/positive process.

• This is also true of all printed circuit boards found in modern computers, which are miniaturised by photographic reduction.

• Fox Talbot's work is still remembered today at the Fox Talbot Museum of Photography in Lacock.