Fox Talbot is universally recognised as the father of modern photography.

His 'calotype' or 'Talbotype' process was the first working photographic process to use negatives and positives. He was an ambitious man but his interests spread far beyond the confines of photography and it was as a mathematician that he was awarded first Membership and then Fellowship of the Royal Society before the age of thirty-three. He was an accomplished astronomer, a keen archaeologists and a fluent master of Greek and Hebrew.

This is a concise biography of the man who patented pioneering ideas for internal combustion engines and as early as 1840 and through his life was at the forefront of progressive scientific thinking in England.