Group of Three Portraits, c. 1843

John Plumbe Jr., born 1809 in Wales, was a railroad surveyor, author, editor, publisher and daguerreian. Notably, Plumbe established a franchise of daguerreotype studios and galleries throughout America in the 1840s. During this time he also manufactured cameras, miniature cases, and daguerreotype plates. Towards the end of the decade, he refocused attention to publishing and promoting his galleries and in Floyd and Marion Rinhart’s The American Daguerreotype (1981), he is credited as ‘probably the greatest promoter of photography, rivaled only later by George Eastman’ (p. 406).

While his entrepreneurship in photography is impressive, he was equally ambitious in his previous career as a railroad man. At just twenty-three he was superintendent of the railroad between Richmond, Virginia and North Carolina and envisioned a railroad linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Once becoming then also a successful daguerreotypist, his portraits were so popular that he required appointments and a detailed register of sitters. During his phase of rapid expansion, he purchased several patents including one for creating color daguerreotypes. In 1847 he sold his New York gallery, and then the others soon after that. He ended his life in 1857, discouraged by opposition from Washington D.C. to his plan, to which he had returned, for creating a transcontinental railroad.