Rev. Joseph Bancroft Reade FRS FRMS (5 April 1801 – 12 December 1870) was an English clergyman, amateur scientist and pioneer of photography. A gentleman scientist, Reade co-founded the Royal Microscopical Society and the Royal Meteorological Society.

Early life

Born Leeds, he was the eldest of six sons and two daughters. His father, Thomas Shaw Bancroft Reade (1776–1841), was a merchant and Christian pamphleteer who actively supported the British and Foreign Bible Society. His mother, Sarah née Paley (d. 1825), was a relative of William Paley. He was educated at Leeds Grammar School, Trinity College, Cambridge and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1825.

Clerical career

Reade was ordained a deacon in the Church of England and became curate of Kegworth, Leicestershire. He married Charlotte Dorothy Farish (1796–1882), niece of William Farish in 1825, and the couple parented three children, none of whom lived beyond 21 years of age. Reade was ordained priest in 1826 and took his master's degree in 1828.

In 1859, Reade became vicar of Ellesborough, Buckinghamshire, and from 1863 until his death, rector of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury.Towards the end of his life, Reade suffered from cancer and died from jaundice at the Bishopsbourne rectory. He was buried at St Mary's Church. Reade was interested in chemistry and botany, performing microscopic investigations of various specimens including microfossils. His knowledge of metal salts led to an 1846 ink patent. A design for a telescope eyepiece won a medal at The Great Exhibition in 1851, and he designed a condenser, known as "Reade's kettledrum" (1861), and a novel prism (1869).

Photography

Reade was present at the Royal Society to hear William Fox Talbot's first presentations on photography in February 1839 and immediately started to experiment himself.

Reade was also at the Royal Society on 14 March to hear Sir John Herschel's seminal paper on photography in which Herschel proposed sodium hyposulfite as a fixer.

(The fictional discovery of a salt-solution fixer is portrayed in the film The Governess.)

Herschel also made some observations on the light sensitivity of silver carbonate, nitrate and acetate as being superior to silver chloride.

Reade began experimenting with light-sensitive substances in a solar microscope, for the intensity of the light it projected to produce images of small transparent objects. He soon discovered that he could get much better results when the silver salt was applied not to paper but to tanned leather.

  • Founding member of the British Meteorological Society (1850};
  • Photographic Society
  • Member, (1855);