In April 1853, the Manchester instrument maker John Benjamin Dancer photographed a memorial plaque to the inventor William Sturgeon, then used a microscope lens to reduce the four-by-five-inch plate to one-sixteenth of an inch — about a millimetre and a half, roughly the point of a sharpened pencil. The plaque’s nineteen lines, 680 letters in all, were still legible under magnification. Anika Burgess’s essay for The Public Domain Review traces what happened to that trick over the next half-century.

Microphotography (regular objects rendered tiny) is not photomicrography (tiny things photographed through a microscope), and the distinction matters for how the new format travelled:

  • Dancer sold microphotographs of portraits, religious texts, paintings and landmarks to a Victorian public that increasingly owned microscopes; Queen Victoria owned a Dancer ring with jewel-lens portraits of her family
  • Sir David Brewster, writing the “Microscope” entry for the 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica, calculated that a family group of seven portraits fit in the space of a pinhead, “so that ten thousand single portraits could be included in a square inch”
  • Thomas Sutton’s Dictionary of Photography (1858) dismissed the whole practice as “little or no practical utility,” “trifling and childish.” Brewster, in the same year, predicted almost exactly what microfilm would become: microscopic copies of despatches and plans “transmitted by post,” secrets hidden in “a space not larger than a full stop.”

The commercial form was the Stanhope, patented in Paris by René Dagron in 1859: a microphotograph glued to the end of an eight-millimetre glass cylinder, capped with a convex magnifying lens, then mounted into a ring, pipe, crucifix, watch key, needle case, pocketknife or — in one reported case — a bullet. Dagron’s reducing box used up to twenty-five lenses at once and could turn out 450 microphotographs per plate; by the end of 1861 he employed 150 people.

Because a hidden image is known only to its owner, a large share of Stanhopes carried nudes and sex scenes — the subject the photographic press of the day called “indecent,” “lewd” or “objectionable.”

  • Australian customs seized packets of watch keys from Germany in 1869 containing “the most obscene and disgusting pictures,” viewed by holding them to the eye
  • A box of roughly 2,000 erotic Stanhopes seized by the US Postal Service in 1924 arrived unannounced at the Kinsey Institute in 1959
  • When the wreck of the steamboat Bertrand, sunk on the Missouri in 1865, was excavated, researchers found erotic Stanhopes concealed in the handles of salvaged pocketknives

The format’s serious career arrived with the Siege of Paris. Dagron left the besieged city by balloon, set up in Tours, and reduced military correspondence to collodion films holding about 3,000 messages on a sheet smaller than a Post-it. Fifteen films fitted inside a goose quill, tied to a carrier pigeon with silk thread. He repeated dispatches until balloon post confirmed receipt, and later estimated he sent some 2.5 million. Some birds were shot, some taken by Prussian hawks, some lost to winter weather. He also microfilmed entire newspaper editions — the direct ancestor of archival microfilm.

The essay’s implicit argument is that Sutton’s sneer was exactly backwards about which uses would endure. The “trifling” application — concealment, desire, a private image carried on the person — proved the most persistent and most commercially inventive, while the respectable one turned out to be the technology of siege and empire. Burgess’s piece is adapted from her book Flashes of Brilliance (W. W. Norton, 2025).