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The ambrotype, also known as a collodion positive in the United Kingdom, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. As a cheaper alternative to the French daguerreotype, ambrotypes came to replace them. Like a print on paper, it is viewed by reflected light. Like the daguerreotype or the prints produced by a Land camera, each is a unique original that could only be duplicated by using a camera to copy it.
The ambrotype was introduced in the 1850s. During the 1860s it was superseded by the tintype, a similar photograph on thin black-lacquered iron, hard to distinguish from an ambrotype if under glass.
The term ambrotype comes from ambrotos, "immortal", and τύπος typos, "impression".
"After considerable improvements, this process was first introduced, in 1854, into various Daguerrean establishments, in the Eastern and Western States, by Cutting & Rehn. In June of this year, Cutting procured patents for the process, though Langdell had already worked it from the printed formulas.
"The process has since been introduced, as a legitimate business, into the leading establishments of our country. The positive branch of it; i.e. a solar impression upon one glass-plate, which is covered by a second hermetically sealed thereto, is entitled the "Ambrotype," (or the "imperishable picture"), a name devised in my gallery.
Root also states (pp. 373): "Isaac Rehn, formerly a successful daguerreotypist, in company with Cutting, of Boston, perfected and introduced through the United States the "Ambrotype," or the positive on glass." What isn't mentioned in the referenced book is the particular year in which the term "ambrotype" was first used.
Ambrotypes were much less expensive to produce than , the medium that predominated when they were introduced, and did not have the bright mirror-like metallic surface that could make daguerreotypes troublesome to view and which some people disliked. An ambrotype, however, appeared dull and drab when compared with the brilliance of a well-made and properly viewed daguerreotype.
By the late 1850s, the ambrotype was overtaking the daguerreotype in popularity. In 1858, the New York City Police Department, inspired by the pioneering Criminal Investigation Department in Glasgow, Scotland, used ambrotypes to establish a "rogues' gallery", consisting of portraits of wanted criminals and arrested villains. By the mid-1860s, the ambrotype itself was being replaced by the tintype, a similar image on a sturdy black-lacquered thin iron sheet, as well as by photographic albumen paper prints made from glass plate collodion negatives.
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