The English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton postulated in his 1704 treatise Opticks that astronomy would be more efficient if only the Earth’s own atmosphere were not so often in the way. He suggested viewing the sky with telescopes in the ‘most serene and quiet air’ that might be found ‘on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds’.¹ To test Newton’s suggestion, 152 years later in 1856, the Italian-born, British scientist, and Scottish Astronomer Royal Charles Piazzi Smyth — frustrated by the coal dust choking the cloudy Edinburgh skies — set up a mountaintop astronomical observatory on a peak of Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands.² The volcanic island, Smyth argued, was a preferable location for the clearest views of celestial phenomena because ‘of all high mountains the most quickly accessible from England, [it was] the most easily climbed, and [had] the very considerable elevation of 12,200 feet’.³

Smyth personally took stereo-photographic views of every step of this journey, including images of his crew, the boat trip, setting up camps, constructing an observatory, climbing mountains, the rugged terrain, and of the island’s plants and rocks (Figs. 1, 2). He also kept a detailed meteorological journal. Smyth previously trained as a painter and was taught photography by pioneering British practitioners William Henry Fox Talbot and Sir John Herschel, but his interest in photography was solely in its value as a research tool. He was an occasional dabbler in the medium who nevertheless still preferred words, diagrams, and sketches to illustrate his astronomical theories.⁴ Smyth previously used photography as the basis for woodcut illustrations to include in the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh’s reports and recognized its utility for rendering accurate likenesses — even though he felt the images needed some refinement for publication.⁵ Nevertheless, as Larry Schaaf suggests, Smyth’s Tenerife photography helped establish the medium as a documentary tool (p. 290).

Fig. 1: Charles Piazzi Smyth, Culminating Point of the Peak of Teneriffe, 12,198 Feet High Showing the Interior of the Terminal Crater of the Mountain (1856), albumen print, stereograph, 17.78 × 8.89 cm, in C. Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe — An Astronomer’s Experiment (Lowell Reeve, 1858). Public domain.

Fig. 2: Charles Piazzi Smyth, Sheepshanks Telescope First Erected on Mount Guajara, the Peak of Teneriffe in the Distance (1856), albumen print, stereograph, 17.78 × 8.89 cm, in C. Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe — An Astronomer’s Experiment (Lowell Reeve, 1858). Public domain.

Stereo photography, born just five years before Smyth’s Tenerife trip, consisted of viewing through a binocular-like device two nearly similar photographs made by a camera with two lenses spaced at a distance similar to that between our eyes. When re-viewed through a device that isolates the view of each eye, the images simulate real life with three-dimensional effects, absorbing the viewer in a spectacular facsimile that differed from real-life views by breaking scenes into separate planes of receding flatness.⁶ The audiences for Smyth’s work — scientists, stereography enthusiasts, and the general public — would have been familiar with the illusory effects of this type of photography. As Smyth wrote in the preface to his book of stereo views, this innovation best expressed the ‘bewitching qualities’ of the landscape of Tenerife using the recently introduced book stereoscope manufactured by the company Negretti and Zambra.⁷

Upon his return Smyth shared these stereo photographs and his travel and research accounts with scientific and stereo-photography journals read by amateur and professional astronomers alike, including the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty and the Royal Society.⁸ Journals were the main means by which scientific societies and people newly fascinated with stereo photography communicated their discoveries, and by which these new ideas were debated and, hopefully, accepted as settled science. Smyth’s research appeared in Philosophical Transactions, the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of the Arts, the Notices of the Proceedings of the Royal Institute of Great Britain, and in an official account titled Report on the Teneriffe Astronomical Experiment of 1856, which included an imagined aerial stereo view of James Nasmyth’s plaster model of Tenerife’s Great Crater (commissioned by Smyth) on its cover (Fig. 3). With this image, Nasmyth tantalized viewers with seductive three-dimensionality while also appealing to his readers’ enthusiasm for seeing the crater from a then unprecedented photographic aerial viewpoint with ideal controlled lighting. Positioning such a composite view on the cover of a scientific report helped Nasmyth’s stereo view — made by sculpturally aggregating dozens of drawings of Tenerife and Moon craters and from Smyth’s notes and measurements — enjoy the status of scientific truth. Plaster models and stereo views highlighted a desire to understand a problem in a new way, in a new dimension, at a time when direct observation was not possible of — for example — a side view of one of the Moon’s craters, or an aerial view of the peak of Teide (the mountain on Tenerife). Smyth’s stereo views also circulated in early photography enthusiast circles, in the Stereoscopic Magazine, and other non-scientific publications. They were later printed in large quantity as the first known book of stereo views, Teneriffe: An Astronomer’s Experiment, in 1858.⁹ In the preface Smyth recommends readers view the individual pages with Negretti and Zambra’s book stereoscope, which required viewers to rest the book on a flat horizontal surface and sit the viewer on top of the image without removing the stereo views from the page (Fig. 4).¹⁰ These publications and their related spin-off projects, such as slide shows and viewings of the plaster models, provided a way to share scientific advances and make knowledge accessible across both professional and amateur audiences, as well as for the general public.

Fig. 3: J. Nasmyth, Stereoscopic Map of the Peak and Great Crater of Teneriffe (1858), photograph of plaster model, in C. Piazzi Smyth, Report of the Teneriffe Astronomical Experiment of 1856: Addressed to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty (printed by Taylor and Francis, 1858), cover. Public domain.

Fig. 4: David Starkman, Smith, Beck & Beck book stereoscope (1859). Smyth’s Tenerife book was reproduced with the intent of being viewed by devices such as these. The stereo images remained in the book as the viewing device rested on top of the photographs and the viewer looked at a slightly different image with each eye. Courtesy of David Starkman, Stereo World.

This article considers the types of photographic, hand-drawn, or sculpted information reported from Smyth’s Tenerife journey and the differing scientific truth issues these images conjured. It also considers how he used photographs to evoke three-dimensionality, such as via the stereo view and photographed plaster model, both of which drove home the ‘reality factor’ of celestial phenomena to his readers and viewers. Illustrated periodicals created an appetite for astronomy, while explaining and exciting a Victorian audience about scientific advances. Smyth’s project was published a little over a decade after the first photograph appeared as an engraving in the Illustrated London News reporting Queen Victoria’s attempted assassination in 1842. The halftone process, which translated and reproduced photographs as a series of dots that represented varying grayscales when seen at arm’s length, first appeared in daily newspapers on 4 March 1880, when the Daily Graphic published the first known news photograph, A Scene in Shantytown, New York. Reproduction Direct from Nature.

Despite a fervour for photography in some British scientific circles (and the enthusiasm of Smyth’s friend and fellow astronomy enthusiast Herschel), the scientific utility of the medium (announced relatively recently in 1839) was not universally embraced — including by Smyth himself. For that reason, Smyth turned to illustration and hand-rendered images to explain and communicate celestial phenomena and to make tangible analogies to Earth’s features, and he shared these with his peers. Smyth’s landmark stereoscopic book — filled with many photographs initially printed by his wife Jessica Piazzi Smyth — relies on photography as a means to document the scientific journey, rather than to verify or report his scientific discoveries.¹¹

Smyth’s developments mark a milestone moment in the history of data visualization. Nasmyth’s nimble movement from two to three dimensions, and back again, also offers a conceptual precursor to the processes of scientific information visualization using models to access new perspectives and scientific insights, and to explain ideas more persuasively. This play between scales and dimensions allowed Nasmyth to use photography to draw analogies between the geological processes on the Earth and those on the Moon, and between random everyday phenomena such as wrinkles on an ageing hand and the formation of mountains.¹² Nasmyth’s process of moving between the human hand and the camera by drawing, modelling, and photographing his plaster models reflects the British scientific community’s ambivalence about this new medium’s promise as a method of communicating their discoveries. Removing the human hand from the subject-creation process and trusting photography was not a step either Smyth or Nasmyth were ready to take — yet. As a result, the project was chronicled and reported by a mix of plaster-crafted subjects that were photographed, stereographic documentary images of the scientific journey that simulated the three-dimensional experience, and illustrations of celestial phenomena.

Astronomical discoveries and photography (or the lack thereof)

The group first set up a darkroom tent, as well as a temporary observatory atop Mount Guajara, a dormant volcano four miles south of Teide, and about 8900 feet above sea level.²¹ They made astronomical observations there for about a month. Smyth hailed the clarity of the stars as he saw them through his Sheepshanks telescope (see Fig. 2).²² Here, he recorded the first known data of the Moon’s temperature and documented the appearances of sunspots, planets, and hundreds of stars. Dust and sulphur fumes from the nearby active volcanos, however, irked Smyth and ‘spoiled many of the photographic plates’.²³ Moreover, photographs were unable then to be taken from hot-air balloons to access aerial views from multiple angles, leaving Smyth to focus instead on sketching scientific phenomena and employing Nasmyth to create plaster models of the peak’s Great Crater, for example.²⁴

They shortly moved camp in search of even clearer views at Alta Vista, but it was beyond the elevation that equipment-bearing mules could reach so the crew had to haul equipment by hand. Smyth again noted the amazing clarity of the telescope’s views, but also that the light was twice as penetrating, prompting him to adjust his photographic exposures.²⁵ His time at Tenerife more than affirmed Newton’s expectations that being above the clouds was far preferable for making astronomical observations, while also challenging Smyth’s photography skills. He produced new information on the optical phenomenon of the ‘Airy Disc’ — a diffraction pattern of concentric circles formed by a light-reflecting object when light passes through an aperture (Fig. 5). He explained this phenomenon in drawings, which allowed him to avoid the challenges and trial and error of taking photographs through a telescope, a technique that John Adams Whipple had conquered only two years earlier, with much difficulty.²⁶ Smyth also described the appearances of binary and compound stars with added detail, commented on the appearances of Jupiter and lunar craters, and his body of research was the first to positively detect heat emanating from the Moon.

Fig. 5: Charles Piazzi Smyth, Airy disc diagrams (1856), engraving, in Astronomical Observations Made at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, 12 (1855–59), p. 513. Public domain.

Plaster moonscape craze

From the early 1850s plaster models of Moon craters and mountaintops led Smyth and Nasmyth to realize that this modelling technique could help them study and understand Tenerife’s volcanic crater more effectively. The Tenerife crater model reminded viewers that many astronomical phenomena were explainable by analogy to our own planet.³⁴ Nasmyth had started making his own plaster models of Moon craters ‘as a means of overcoming the challenge of trying to photograph the Moon directly in the 1850s’.³⁵ His models began as dozens of drawings, which Nasmyth continually refined and translated into a three-dimensional plaster model. He then photographed the model to transport the information back into two dimensions — for easy portability and sharing in publications. Functionally, this process of reconstituting and sharing visual representation fluidly from one dimension to another encouraged viewers to imagine new possibilities, perspectives, and worlds, while moving from drawing to sculpture, and then, to photography.³⁶

As an amateur astronomer, Nasmyth had been content with drawing what he saw in the telescope, a process that he felt made him look more carefully at his subjects.³⁷ But by the 1850s, plaster models of the Moon’s craters gained widespread popularity in European astronomy circles, especially models that illustrated similarities between the Moon’s geographical features and the Earth’s (Figs. 6, 7). Nasmyth and Smyth knew of the then well-known plaster models by English chemist Henry Blunt, who used the emerging technology of electrotyping to reproduce and distribute his plaster model of the Moon’s Eratosthenes crater. In addition to bringing it to astronomy group meetings and at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Blunt’s model of Eratosthenes, the deep lunar impact crater, reappeared in 1851 at the Great Exhibition and was exhibited within the broad category of ‘Class 10: Philosophical, Musical, Horological, and Surgical Instruments’.³⁸ Blunt won a prize for this model, with judges noting that it was ‘beautifully executed, representing very accurately this part of the moon’.³⁹ Charlotte Readhouse’s detailed relief model of the full Moon as a lunar globe also appeared in the same galleries at the Crystal Palace exhibition, and an early daguerreotype photograph of the Moon was exhibited by John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond to enthusiastic crowds.⁴⁰

Fig. 6: James Nasmyth, Portion of the Moon’s Surface of the Same Area as that Given in the Illustration of Vesuvius and Neighbourhood of Naples (c. 1885), woodburytype based on plaster model, 12.7 × 9.2 cm, in James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World an a Satellite (Murray, 1885), Plate VII. Public domain.

Fig. 7: James Nasmyth, Gassendi, Nov 7, 1867. 10 p.m, woodburytype of plaster model, 21 × 28 cm, in James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (Murray, 1874), frontispiece. Public domain.

This fervour for plaster models and visualizing the Moon and the Earth’s landscape was further kindled by the 1854 publication of photographs of plaster models of the Alpine mountains Monte Rosa and the Zugspitze by German brothers Adolph and Hermann Schlagintweit.⁴¹ Photographs of plaster models that visualized scientific data also reassured readers that phenomena such as Moon craters were not terribly unlike Tenerife’s craters, or Arthur’s Seat, the dormant volcano on which the historical centre of Smyth’s then hometown of Edinburgh was perched. Many of Nasmyth’s models of craters were also displayed at science museums and at learned societies such as the Royal Astronomical Society, and were featured at public-focused events at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which sought ‘to promote the intercourse of the cultivators of science with one another’.⁴² The printed photographs helped the plaster models circulate more widely. The models’ performative presence at these spin-off events and exhibitions helped secure the public’s fascination while making science more accessible, understandable, and wondrous. These hypothetical images kept with the astronomical tradition of privileging handmade images to make theories visible and discursive.

An analogical understanding of the Moon

In 1874 Nasmyth collaborated with the former Royal Observatory astronomer James Carpenter to publish The Moon, Considered a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, a generously illustrated book involving multiple plaster models that was well received by critics.⁴³ Furthermore, these models were regarded as tangible scientific documents that enjoyed a privileged relationship to three-dimensional reality in a way that a two-dimensional sketch of a photograph never could. As such, they were viewed as sculptures that ‘straddle science and art’, rendering the photographic and/or the drawing ‘actual’, even though they were handmade plaster models.⁴⁴

In one photograph Nasmyth presented his own wrinkled hand, along with that of a shrivelling apple, as visual, geological, and physiological analogies to the Moon’s surface phenomena (Fig. 8). These analogies, ‘grounded in forms or materials familiar, tangible, and actual, which include not just relief maps, terrestrial mountains, and old apples’, explained the surface appearances of the Earth and Moon to a Victorian audience.⁴⁵ As Omar Nasim argues, this helped Nasmyth make phenomena that had been

inaccessible or unfamiliar into the mundane, accessible, and wholly familiar; and that the causes which give rise to specific forms at the level of the mundane might be similar to those unfolding at the level of the grand, sublime and distant.⁴⁶

Fig. 8: James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, Back of Hand & Shrivelled Apple to Illustrate the Origin of Certain Mountain Ranges by Shrinkage of the Globe (1874), 11.5 × 8 cm each, in James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (Murray, 1874), Plate II. Public domain.

Grounding this information in the operative logic of accessible objects removes the Moon from the narrative realm of folklore or fantasy and firmly places it in the explainable realism of everyday life. As such, Nasmyth’s work gave astronomy the credibility of operating not in speculation but tangible reality. This was a particularly daunting task for the study of phenomena that could only be accessed distantly, via telescopes. Likewise, Smyth’s photographs of Tenerife made this faraway land and its features — human, cultural, and geological — accessible and real to a Victorian audience, while introducing readers to scientific discoveries that are represented in handmade imagery, introduced without pretence, in the familiar, entertainment-associated genre of stereography.

Notes

1. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, 4th edn, corrected (printed for William Innys, 1730), Prop. VIII, Prob. II, p. 98. [^{^}]
2. The current preferred spelling for the island is ‘Tenerife’, although in the mid-nineteenth century, it was frequently spelled ‘Teneriffe’. Smyth and his crew use the latter spelling. This article adopts today’s standard spelling unless the older spelling was used in artwork and publication titles, direct quotes, and citations. [^{^}]
3. Larry Schaaf, ‘Piazzi Smyth at Teneriffe: Part I The Expedition and the Resulting Book’, History of Photography, 4.4 (1980), pp. 289–307 (p. 289). [^{^}]
4. Ibid., p. 289. [^{^}]
5. Ibid., p. 289. [^{^}]
6. The camera Smyth used likely featured a sliding lens that he moved between sequential exposures (Schaaf, p. 296). [^{^}]
7. Charles Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, an Astronomer’s Experiment; or, Specialities of a Residence above the Clouds (Lovell Reeve, 1858), p. xi. [^{^}]
8. Schaaf suggests that Smyth did not take the photographs with an intent to reproduce them, even though that is exactly what he did fairly soon after he finished his trip (p. 296). For more discussion on the role of amateur astronomers during the nineteenth century, see Allan Chapman, The Victorian Amateur Astronomer: Independent Astronomical Research in Britain, 1820–1920 (Wiley/Praxis Publishing, 1998). [^{^}]
9. About 1600 copies of the book sold initially. Schaaf notes that ‘this was a very substantial sale for any book of this period, particularly so for one of this novelty and high price’ (p. 304, emphasis in original). As Smyth recounts, ‘I commenced, with the assistance of Mr Lovell Reeve of London, the publication of a book on the results of my little astronomical experiment on the Peak of Teneriffe in 1856. Mr. Reeve, long known for his exertions in improving the illustrations of scientific works, jumped at the idea of availing himself of my stereoscopic photographs for the plates of the book, and opened a correspondence to that end with the company of the long name.’ Charles Piazzi Smyth, ‘On Photographic Illustrations for Books’, Transactions of the Scottish Society of Arts, 5 (1861), pp. 87–92 (p. 88). [^{^}]
10. Smyth, Teneriffe, p. xi. [^{^}]
11. C. Piazzi Smyth, Report on the Teneriffe Astronomical Experiment of 1856, Addressed to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty (printed by Taylor and Francis, 1858), p. 574. Rose Teanby notes that Jessica Piazzi Smyth’s role as an assistant in printing her husband’s work was not unusual. Constance Talbot, for example, provided such assistance to husband William Henry Fox Talbot, too. For more on the position of early women photographers in the United Kingdom, see Rose Teanby, ‘A Pioneering Legacy: Early Women Photographers of Great Britain and Ireland 1839–1861’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, De Montfort University, 2024). [^{^}]
12. James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, 4th edn (Murray, 1903), Plate II, facing p. 48. [^{^}]
13. Schaaf notes that ‘it was true that in the days when [Smyth] actively corresponded with Herschel he had practised the calotype quite successfully’ (p. 290). [^{^}]
14. Ibid., p. 291. [^{^}]
15. Olin J. Eggen, ‘Charles Piazzi Smyth’, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Leaflets, 7.313 (1955), pp. 1–8 (p. 3) <https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1955ASPL....7...97E> [accessed 11 July 2025]. [^{^}]
16. Smyth, Teneriffe, p. 5. [^{^}]
17. Ibid., pp. 32, 29, 34–35. [^{^}]
18. For more on the stereograph’s connection to the phenomenon of ‘armchair travel’ and the creation of visual ‘virtual realities’, see Joan M. Schwartz, ‘The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginary Geographies’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22.1 (1996), pp. 16–45, doi:10.1006/jhge.1996.0003. [^{^}]
19. Eggen, p. 3. [^{^}]
20. Alan W. Hirshfeld, ‘Picturing the Heavens: The Rise of Celestial Photography in the 19th Century’, Sky and Telescope, 107.4 (2004), pp. 36–43 (p. 38). [^{^}]
21. Schaaf describes this step of the Tenerife story: ‘On 14th July, more than 20 horses and mules, with their drivers, began the laborious process of carting the bulky Anglo-Saxon instruments up the steep and rough mountain. Starting at sunrise and climbing all day, the party reached the 8700 feet high point of Guajara a few minutes after sunset. The native porters departed immediately, leaving the British party to fend for itself. Fortunately, Piazzi had begun his astronomical training at the Cape by making field surveys in rough country’ (p. 295). [^{^}]
22. Smyth noted that the clarity was stunning from atop Mount Guajara: ‘[He] found the space-penetrating power extended from mag. 10 to mag. 14, and so great an improvement in definition, that a magnifying power of 240 could be used with more satisfaction on the mountain, than one of 60 in Edinburgh.’ C. Piazzi Smyth, ‘Report of Proceedings of the Astronomical Expedition to Teneriffe, in 1857’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 8 (1856–57), pp. 528–29 (p. 528) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/111409> [accessed 11 July 2025]. [^{^}]
23. Schaaf, p. 297. [^{^}]
24. To date, the oldest surviving aerial photographs are James Wallace Black’s 1860 views of Boston from a hot-air balloon. However, Gaspar Félix Tournachon (known as ‘Nadar’) photographed the French village of Petit-Bicêtre (now Petit-Clamart) from a hot-air balloon at a height of 262 feet, although none of these images have survived. Smyth’s project predated these experiments. [^{^}]
25. Schaaf, p. 297. [^{^}]
26. Kris Belden-Adams, ‘John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37’, Smarthistory, 30 June 2022 <https://smarthistory.org/john-whipple-william-bond-and-george-bond-the-moon-no-37/> [accessed 11 July 2025]. [^{^}]
27. Schaaf, p. 299. [^{^}]
28. Smyth, in a lecture in 1858, described Nasmyth’s crater model of Tenerife: ‘while employing upon it all that artistic skill for which he is so well known to all present, [Nasmyth] has yet conformed most faithfully and conscientiously to all the measurement particulars of length, breadth, and height, that I could furnish him with.’ C. Piazzi Smyth, ‘On Certain Connecting Points between Lunar and Terrestrial Volcanoes’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 18.5 (1858), pp. 156–62 (p. 158), doi:10.1093/mnras/18.5.156. [^{^}]
29. Louise E. Devoy, ‘Lunar Crater Models: Tools of Persuasion, Popularization and Shared Knowledge’, Nuncius, 35.2 (2020), pp. 300–32, doi:10.1163/18253911-03502006. Smyth describes the illumination of the photographs: ‘This was done at the lecture by means of a Drummond lime ball light, which was afterwards employed in magnifying and exhibiting, by optical pictures, a series of thirty-six photographs of volcanic features, at from 7,000 to 12,200 feet above the sea-level. Mr. Nasmyth had also very kindly allowed six of his large and unequalled drawings of the moon’s surface to be suspended in the room, for the purpose of contrast and comparison.’ Smyth, ‘On Certain Connecting Points’, p. 158. [^{^}]
30. Devoy, p. 300; James Nasmyth, ‘The Moon and its Surface Inequalities’, Strines Journal, 4 (1855), pp. 110–15. [^{^}]
31. J. Norman Lockyer, review of James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874), Nature, 12 March 1874, pp. 358–61. [^{^}]
32. Omar Nasim, ‘James Nasmyth on the Moon; or, On Becoming a Lunar Being, without the Lunacy’, in Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century Drawings to Spacecraft Imaging, ed. by Carmen Pérez González (Brill, 2018), pp. 147–87 (p. 184), doi:10.1163/9789004298873_007. Nasim further notes: ‘As we have already seen, geology was surely another science where the use of physical models was prevalent. Indeed, it has been argued that physical, geological models were used as forms of experiment — that they were even “technologies of the imagination”’ (p. 184); Thomas Brandstetter, ‘Time Machines: Model Experiments in Geology’, Centaurus, 53.2 (2011), pp. 135–45, doi:10.1111/j.1600-0498.2011.00216.x; and Naomi Oreskes, ‘From Scaling to Simulation: Changing Meanings and Ambitions of Models in Geology’, in Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives, ed. by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise (Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 93–124, doi:10.1215/9780822390244. For another take on the productive side of models, see Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015), doi:10.1215/9780822375630. [^{^}]
33. Kris Belden-Adams, Time Warped: Photography, Temporality, Modernity (Routledge, 2020), pp. 1–6. [^{^}]
34. Devoy, p. 312. [^{^}]
35. Devoy, p. 314. Henry Blunt’s model of the Eratosthenes crater was finished in electrotype frosted silver, and won a prize in 1852. See Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations: Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided, Presentation Copy (Clowes, 1852), Class X, p. 312. [^{^}]
36. For more on the role of the plaster model in early photography, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘An Almost Unlimited Variety: Photography and Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roxana Marcoci, Geoffrey Batchen, and Tobia Bezzola, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 20–26. [^{^}]
37. John Adams Whipple described the difficulties of making a ‘well defined, beautiful daguerreotype of the Moon’, noting that ‘nothing could be more interesting than its appearance through that magnificent instrument, but to transfer it to the silver plate, to make something tangible of it was quite a different thing.’ John A. Whipple, letter, Photographic Art-Journal, July 1853, p. 66, emphasis in original. [^{^}]
38. Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations: Reports by the Juries, p. 312. [^{^}]
39. Ibid., p. 312; ‘Messrs. Marshall’s Great Exhibition Medal’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 6 February 1852. [^{^}]
40. ‘1851 Great Exhibition: Official Catalogue: Class X: Charlotte Readhouse’, entry 677, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History <https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/1851_Great_Exhibition:_Official_Catalogue:_Class_X.:_Charlotte_Readhouse> [accessed 12 July 2025]. It is interesting to note that these other Moon effigies won awards, but one made by a female creator did not. That topic is beyond the purview of this article, but merits further study. [^{^}]
41. Sigrid Schulze, ‘Seen from Above: Wilhelm Halffter’s Photographs of 1854, Depicting the Terrain Models of Hermann and Adolph Schlagintweit’, Ebrary <https://ebrary.net/143049/travel/from_wilhelm_halffter_s_photographs_1854_depicting_terrain_models_hermann_adolph_schlagintweit> [accessed 12 July 2025]. [^{^}]
42. ‘First Report — 1831’, in Report of the First and Second Meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 2nd edn (Murray, 1835), pp. 7–91 (p. 22). [^{^}]
43. R. Angus Buchanan, ‘Nasmyth, James Hall (1808–1890), Mechanical Engineer’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, entry dated 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19801. [^{^}]
44. Nasim, p. 147. [^{^}]
45. James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (Murray, 1874), Plate II, heliotype, facing p. 30; Nasim, p. 178. [^{^}]
46. Nasim, p. 176. [^{^}]
47. James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography, ed. by Samuel Smiles (Murray, 1905), p. 95, emphasis in original. [^{^}]