John Carbutt (December 2, 1832– July 26, 1905) was a photographic pioneer, stereo card publisher, and photographic entrepreneur. He came to be the first to use

celluloid 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 ...

for photographic film and to market dry-plate glass negatives. He was born in

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, situated south of Leeds and east of Manchester. The city is the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire and some of its so ...

, England on 2 December 1832. He moved to Chicago in 1853. In 1866, as the official photographer for the

Union Pacific Railroad The Union Pacific Railroad is a Railroad classes, Class I freight-hauling railroad that operates 8,300 locomotives over routes in 23 U.S. states west of Chicago and New Orleans. Union Pacific is the second largest railroad in the United Stat ...

, he produced the series of stereographic cards titled ''Rail Road Excursion to the 100th Meridian.'' The series celebrated the crossing of the border between the western and eastern United States in October 1866 during the construction of the

transcontinental railroad A transcontinental railroad or transcontinental railway is contiguous rail transport, railroad trackage that crosses a continent, continental land mass and has terminals at different oceans or continental borders. Such networks may be via the Ra ...

.Micah Messenheimer
Camera and Locomotive: Two Tracks Across the Continent
''Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division'' Carbutt founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works in 1879 and was the first to develop sheets of

coated with

photographic emulsion Photographic emulsion is a light-sensitive colloid used in film-based photography. Most commonly, in silver-gelatin photography, it consists of silver halide crystals dispersed in gelatin. The emulsion is usually coated onto a substrate of gla ...

for making celluloid film in 1888. Carbutt sliced thin plates from a rigid celluloid block, and then coated them with a silver gelatin emulsion to make a Celluloid Dry plate. Around 1890 he made them in a 35 mm width for William Kennedy Dickson's Kinetoscope, which set the 35 mm film standard for motion picture cameras and still

camera A camera is an instrument used to capture and store images and videos, either digitally via an electronic image sensor, or chemically via a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. As a pivotal technology in the fields of photograp ...

s. That image format is one of the dominant formats to this day, as the majority of high end

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

s use a 35mm frame-sized sensor and 35mm film is still being used by some photographers and film makers. Carbutt is interred at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

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* 19th-century American inventors American cinema pioneers British cinema pioneers Pioneers of photography 1832 births 1905 deaths History of film Photographers from Illinois Businesspeople from Chicago English emigrants to the United States People from Sheffield 19th-century American photographers 19th-century American scientists Burials at West Laurel Hill Cemetery {{Photographer-stub

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