A Word Is Born

 It seems it was on this day in 1839 that the word 'photography' entered the language. The polymath – inventor, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist, etc. – Sir John Herschel described, in a lecture at the Royal Society in London, a series of processes that he called 'photography', i.e. drawing with light. No one had uttered the word in public before.
This gives me a ready-made excuse for posting Julia Margaret Cameron's wonderful 1867 photograph of Sir John in old age – a perfect example of 'drawing with light', and surely one of the greatest portrait photographs ever taken (if 'taken' is the word – perhaps 'made' would be better).