An interesting story that will interest many of use who own old (and deteriorated) daguerreotype photographs:

Techniques developed by researchers from Western University to create images from old, badly tarnished photographs could also be used to study other historic artifacts and fossils and prevent corrosion on modern materials.   

Chemistry professor T.K. Sham

Chemistry professor Tson-Kong (T.K.) Sham and his colleagues recently confirmed a new synchrotron imaging technique they developed is just as effective for retrieving corroded daguerreotypes – the earliest form of photographs – as a strategy they first reported in 2018, and can also be used no matter how badly damaged the image surface is from natural corrosion or cleaning attempts. The new research, which used beamlines at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, is published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. 

“This technique can be used widely in all walks of science, from looking at tissues to materials science,” Sham said.  

“You could determine whether or how a metal may be corrosion-resistant. Or in the case of an already corroded material, you can learn what the product of that corrosion is and its distribution on the surface, and then you can work back and think about how to prevent that corrosion from happening.”  

Sham said many applications are possible because synchrotron X-ray is very tunable, which means it can pick out any element and find out what its chemical surrounding is and where it is placed in the sample, even imaging it layer by layer. 

You can read more in an article published in the westernu.ca web site at: https://news.westernu.ca/2024/04/reviving-daguerreotypes/ .