Friday, October 29, 2010

Latest Edition to My Collection - Signed CDV by Benjamin Silliman (1799-1864)

Carte-de-visites, also referred to as CDVs were often used as calling cards, and were collected for display in cabinets as well, and are often referred to as "cabinet photos" for this reason.  This CDV signed by Benjamin Silliman is the latest addition to my collection and the first cabinet photo as well. 

Copyright © Mark I. Grossman

Carte-de-visite (CDV) signed by Benjamin Silliman, 4 x 2.5 in.
Verso reads: "Augustus Morand,
297-Fulton Street, cor. Johnson, Brooklyn."


The photographer, Augustus Morand, was elected president of the the New York State Daguerreian Society in 1851, and his studio was located in Brooklyn approximately during the period 1860-1862.  See P. E. Palmquist and T. R. Kailbourn, Pioneer photographers from the Mississippi to the continental divide: a biographical dictionary, 1839-1865Stanford University Press (2005), 449.                                

Silliman and James L. Kingsley (1778-1852), both professors at Yale at the time of the fall on December 14, 1807, obtained samples of the Weston stone, the first meteorite samples to be recovered in the United States.  For more information about the event and the myth about Thomas Jefferson's statements questioning the veracity of the "two Yankee Professors", see  U.B. Marvin, ‘Meteorites in history: an overview from the Renaissance to the 20th century’, in The history of meteoritics and key meteorite collections:  fireballs, falls and finds (Geological Society of London Special Publication no. 256), (ed. G. J. H. McCall, A. J. Bowden and R. J. Howarth), pp. 51-52 (Geological Society London, 2006).      
Copyright © Mark I. Grossman

Small sample of the Weston meteorite
(0.32 g, H4)



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