David Nunes Carvalho | |
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| Born | September 29, 1848 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | June 29, 1925 (aged 76) New Rochelle, New York |
David Nunes Carvalho (September 29, 1848 - June 29, 1925) was an American ink and handwriting expert who provided testimony in notable legal cases and was the author of Forty Centuries of Ink, a book about ink analysis.
Carvalho was born in 1848, the son of noted artist Solomon Nunes Carvalho and Sarah Miriam Solis. [1] He studied at New York College, where he specialized in organic chemistry and photography. [2] He married Annie M. Abrams and they had six children. The family lived in Breezy Point in Far Rockaway, New York. In 1899 Carvalho sued The Jamaica Bay Turnpike Company to keep them from building a bridge connecting Rockaway Beach to Brooklyn claiming it would "completely destroy the character" of his property. [3] In 1911 he bought a "country estate" in Roslyn, NY. [4]
Carvalho did early work with his father in his father's photography studio. He worked at a photography studio in New York City from 1877 through 1885. He worked with New Jersey Stereoscopic View Company likely in the 1870s and was working for the Bachrach Photo-Engraving Company in 1875. He filed for several patents for improving the photography process.
Carvalho maintained a large collection of handwriting and ink samples and was called upon to testify in legal cases which involved handwriting, especially the signatures on wills, testifying in over 2000 cases. [11] [12] [13] He would investigate the inks used to sign documents chemically as well as microscopically. [14] [15] He received a regular salary from the New York Detective Bureau to consult on cases requiring handwriting analysis. [16] He was also sometimes called on to examine fingerprints. [17] He was scornful of graphology as a means of identifying personality traits stating "I have had the pleasure, so to speak, of sending thousands of forgers to state's prison. Yet with all my study of their penmanship, I never learned an important thing about their characters." [12] He believed that the study of handwriting was an exact science. [18]
His personal collection contained "items that are representative of ordinary handwriting from the 10th to the 20th centuries, written in English, French, Latin, German, and Dutch. The bulk of the items are from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Samples, on paper and vellum, include indentures, letters, receipts, and pages of accounts... also a small set of examples of alphabets from many countries; 19th century examples of engraved death and marriage announcements; engraved portraits of writing masters; examples of minute calligraphy." [19]
The Hartford Daily Courant reported "Sir Conan Doyle stated in a lecture in New York that Mr. Carvalho's powers exceeded those given to Sherlock Holmes." Notable cases he was involved in included the William Marsh Rice case, the People v. Molineux, and the Dreyfus Affair which garnered him international attention as he offered a deposition against the findings of Alphonse Bertillon. [20] [21] He offered testimony that Eric Muenter and Frank Holt were separate people, a determination later found to be incorrect. [22] In 1906 the Keowee Courier called him "the most prominent expert examiner of questioned handwriting, inks and paper in America" after his testimony in a local murder trial. [23]
Carvalho wrote a few books on the topic of handwriting analysis. Forty Centuries of Ink explored how and where ink has been produced, examined its ingredients and its effect on different forms of paper, and discussed how it was used throughout history by different cultures. [2] He critiqued the use of modern colored aniline inks as being impermanent and unsuitable for creating public records. He spent the later part of his career attempting to create a way to make ink, "unerasable" resulting in his 1920 patent creating such a method. [24]
Carvalho died of pneumonia in 1925.
While he was well-known during his lifetime, his career as a handwriting expert was outlined and further promoted the 1929 book, Crime in Ink, written by his daughter Claire Carvalho and Boyden Sparkes. [25] [16] The book, outlining many of his famous cases, received positive reviews and was serialized in Red Book Magazine. [26] [15] [21] The David N. Carvalho Collection of rare books and manuscripts is at the Free Library of Philadelphia. [27] His collection of incunabula was cataloged by biographer Henrietta C. Bartlett before being sold for $1,385.95 in 1917.
Nitrocellulose is a highly flammable compound formed by nitrating cellulose through exposure to a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. One of its first major uses was as guncotton, a replacement for gunpowder as propellant in firearms. It was also used to replace gunpowder as a low-order explosive in mining and other applications. In the form of collodion it was also a critical component in an early photographic emulsion, the use of which revolutionized photography in the 1860s. In the 20th century it was adapted to automobile lacquer and adhesives.
The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.
Celluloids are a class of materials produced by mixing nitrocellulose and camphor, often with added dyes and other agents. Once much more common for its use as photographic film before the advent of safer methods, celluloid's common present-day uses are for manufacturing table tennis balls, musical instruments, combs, office equipment, fountain pen bodies, and guitar picks.
Collodion is a flammable, syrupy solution of nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol. There are two basic types: flexible and non-flexible. The flexible type is often used as a surgical dressing or to hold dressings in place. When painted on the skin, collodion dries to form a flexible nitrocellulose film. While it is initially colorless, it discolors over time. Non-flexible collodion is often used in theatrical make-up. Collodion was also the basis of most wet-plate photography until it was superseded by modern gelatin emulsions.
Frederic Eugene Ives was a U.S. inventor who was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1874–78 he had charge of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University. He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where in 1885 he was one of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1893, the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1903, and the John Scott Medal in 1887, 1890, 1904 and 1906. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1922. His son Herbert E. Ives was a pioneer of television and telephotography, including color facsimile.
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement creating an identification system based on physical measurements.
A tintype, also known as a melanotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal, colloquially called 'tin', coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. It was introduced in 1853 by Adolphe Alexandre Martin in Paris, like the daguerreotype was fourteen years before by Daguerre. The daguerreotype was established and most popular by now, though the primary competition for the tintype would have been the ambrotype, that shared the same collodion process, but on a glass support instead of metal. Both found unequivocal, if not exclusive, acceptance in North America. Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into 1930s and it has been revived as a novelty and fine art form in the 21st century. It has been described as the first "truly democratic" medium for mass portraiture.
James Maybrick was a Liverpool cotton merchant. After his death, his wife, Florence Maybrick, was convicted of murdering him by poisoning in a sensational trial. The "Aigburth Poisoning" case was widely reported in the press on both sides of the Atlantic.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Hand-colouring refers to any method of manually adding colour to a monochrome photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting.
Emanuel Nunes Carvalho was an American Jewish religious leader and lexicographer.
Talbot v Laroche (unreported) was an 1854 legal action, pivotal to the history of photography, by which William Fox Talbot sought to assert that Martin Laroche's use of the unpatented, collodion process infringed his calotype patent.
James Ambrose Cutting (1814–1867) was an American photographer and inventor, sometimes called the inventor of the Ambrotype photographic process.
Peter Wickens Fry was a pioneering English amateur photographer, although professionally he was a London solicitor. In the early 1850s, Fry worked with Frederick Scott Archer, assisting him in the early experiments of the wet collodion process. He was also active in helping Roger Fenton to set up the Royal Photographic Society in 1853. Several of his photographs are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Solomon Nunes Carvalho was an American painter, photographer, author and inventor. He may be best known as an explorer who traveled through the territory of Kansas, Colorado and Utah with John C. Frémont on his fifth expedition. Many famous images of the Old West are based on images he made, although many others have been lost or confused with those taken by Mathew Brady and other contemporaries.
Charles Ainsworth Mitchell was a British chemist and forensic scientist who made a special study of the microscopic and chemical study of handwriting. He was a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and the Chemical Society, and member of the Society of Public Analysts He was editor of The Analyst for 25 years, president of the Medico-Legal Society (1935–1937), and vice president of the Society of Chemistry (1937–1940).
Marilyn Levy was an American chemist and inventor based at Fort Monmouth. She was awarded the United States Army's Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1971.
The Wothlytype was an alternative photographic printing process, the eponymous 1864 invention of the German Jacob Wothly, in which a mixture of uranium ammonio-nitrate and silver nitrate in collodion formed a light-sensitive layer.
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