Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Woodbury, Walter Bentley
WOODBURY, WALTER BENTLEY (1834–1885), inventor of the Woodburytype process, was born at Manchester on 26 June 1834. His father dying when he was quite young, and his mother having a prosperous shop to attend to, he was brought up by his maternal grandfather (who was also his godfather), Walter Bentley. Bentley, who was a naturalist and a friend of Audubon and Waterlow, was related to Thomas Bentley (1731–1780) [q. v.], the partner of Josiah Wedgwood. Woodbury was given a scientific education, and was placed in 1849 as an apprentice in a patent office in Manchester, with a view to becoming an engineer. Three years later he sailed for the Australian gold fields, and passed through many vicissitudes. Having worked in succession as a cook, a driver, a surveyor's labourer, a builder, and a paper-hanger, he obtained a place in the Melbourne waterworks. There he resumed his old hobby of photography, the collodion process in which had been invented by Frederick Scott Archer [q. v.] just before he left England. In 1858 with his partner, James Page, he migrated to Java, and there, at Batavia, worked the collodion process with great success, sending home a series of fine tropical views, which were published by Negretti & Zambra. Having married a Malay lady and attained a small competence, he returned to England in 1863. He settled in Birmingham, where in 1864, while experimenting with carbon printing, he conceived a new mode of photographic engraving. The difficulties to be surmounted were very great, but on 5 Dec. 1865 he was enabled to demonstrate and exhibit examples of the beautiful mechanical process that bears his name to the Photographic Society. The main feature of the invention, patented on 24 July 1866 and called the Woodburytype, is that a photograph in gelatine is caused by enormous pressure to indent a sheet of lead. When perfected the invention came into common use, both in Europe and America. Between this date and his death Woodbury took out over twenty patents for photo-mechanical printing processes and for photographic and allied apparatus. Many of the block processes now in use, notably the Goupil photogravure employed by Boussod, Valadon, & Co., are modifications of Woodburytype. He also invented a method of water-marking, to which he gave the name ‘filigrane.’ A subscription was started among photographers in March 1885 to enable him to develop his stannotype process. The prospect of wealth unsettled the inventor, and he moved restlessly from Craven Cottage on the Thames to Croydon, and then to Brighton; he died suddenly at Margate, from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, on 5 Sept. 1885. He was buried on 12 Sept. in Abney Park cemetery, his grave being near that of two other photographic pioneers, George Wharton Simpson and Henry Baden Pritchard [see under Pritchard, Andrew], both of whom had been intimate friends. He contributed a number of papers on optical lantern experiments to the ‘English Mechanic’ and to ‘Science at Home.’
[Harrison's Hist. of Photography, 1888, pp. 112, 135 (with portrait); Photographic News, 11 Sept. 1885 (portrait); British Journal of Photography, 18 Sept. 1885; Brothers's Photography, its History and Processes, 1892; Werge's Evolution of Photography, 1890, p. 82; Robottom's Travels in search of New Trade Products, 1893, pp. 113–20; Routledge's Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century, 1891, pp. 536–9; Athenæum, 1885, ii. 407; Nature, 24 April 1873; Davanne's La Photographie, 1886–8, i. 37, 142, ii. 223, 239, 244, 313.]