Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Abney, William De Wiveleslie
ABNEY, Sir WILLIAM DE WIVELESLIE (1843–1920), photographic chemist and education official, the eldest son of the Rev. Edward Henry Abney, vicar of St. Alkmund's, Derby, afterwards prebendary of Lichfield, by his wife, Catharine, daughter of Jedediah Strutt, of Greenhall, Belper, was born at Derby 24 July 1843. He was educated at Rossall School, and in 1861 obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers through the Royal Military Academy. The first few years of his service were spent in India, where he was attached to the Sappers and Miners, Bombay, until transferred (1865) to the public works department. In 1867 he returned to England on sick leave and was stationed at Chatham, where in 1871 he was appointed assistant to the instructor in telegraphy at the school of military engineering. A few months afterwards he was appointed instructor in chemistry and photography, a department which in 1874 became a separate school under his sole charge. In 1877 Abney, who had been gazetted captain in 1873, left Chatham and entered the science and art department at South Kensington (afterwards incorporated in the Board of Education) as inspector of science schools. From this time his work followed two distinct, but concurrent, courses, in both of which he was enthusiastic, persevering, and eminently successful.
When Abney joined the science and art department there were not half a dozen practical laboratories, suitable for teaching purposes, connected with it; but at the end of seven years more than a hundred were in existence. Having retired from the army in 1881, he was appointed assistant director for science in 1884 and director in 1893. By 1903, owing to Abney's initiative, practical work in connexion with the teaching of science had made such progress that there were more than a thousand chemical or physical laboratories, besides laboratories for mechanics, metallurgy, and biology, connected with the department. In 1899 Abney was made principal assistant secretary to the Board of Education, and held the position, which is that of chief official in the science division, until he retired in 1903 under the changes brought about by the Education Act of that year. He then became scientific adviser to the Board and a member of the advisory council for education to the War Office.
As a youth Abney had been interested in photography, and, as soon as the opportunity offered, he began scientific investigation of its numerous problems. He soon made a reputation as a leading exponent of practical photography, and as early as 1874 he was given sole charge of the arrangements for photographic observations of the transit of Venus, and went himself to Egypt to observe it. In experimental photography he aimed at devising methods of measurement, and he applied them in researches relating to the intensities of various sources of illumination, to the opacity of photographic deposits, to the exposure efficiency of shutters of various types, and to allied subjects. He was also a pioneer in the advancement of photographic emulsion-making; it was due mainly to discoveries made by Charles Bennett and Abney in this country and by D. B. van Monckhoven, of Ghent, that a rapid gelatine emulsion was first produced (1878–9), making ‘instantaneous’ photography possible. Abney also introduced, in 1881, the gelatino-citro-chloride emulsion printing process, the forerunner of the modern printing-out paper. His treatise, Photography with Emulsions, was long the standard work on the subject. Hardly less important were Abney's investigations (1877) of the alkaline development of the photographic image, and his introduction in 1880 of a new developing agent, hydroquinone.
But Abney's most notable experimental work related to spectro-photography, colour analysis, and colour vision. He re-drew the three-colour sensation curves associated with the Young-Helmholtz theory of colour vision, and as early as 1880 succeeded in making photographic plates sensitive to the red and infra-red; with these he mapped this region of the solar spectrum with an accuracy comparable to that of the standard maps of the normal solar spectrum prepared by A. J. Ångstrom and H. A. Rowland. He made thousands of these specially sensitive plates for use in his chemical and astronomical investigations.
Abney was awarded in 1882 the Rumford medal of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1876. He was made a C.B. in 1888, and K.C.B. in 1900. He was president of the Royal Photographic Society from 1892 to 1894, in 1896, 1903, and 1905; of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1893–1895; and of the Physical Society, 1895–1897. In the autumn of 1920 he went to Folkestone because of his failing health, and died there on 3 December.
Abney married twice: first, in 1864 Agnes Mathilda (who died in 1888), daughter of Edward W. Smith, of Tickton Hall, Yorkshire, by whom he had one son and two daughters; secondly, in 1890 Mary Louisa, daughter of the Rev. E. N. Meade, D.D., of St. Mary's Knoll, Scarborough-on-Hudson, U.S.A., by whom he had one daughter.
The diversity of Abney's scientific labours makes it difficult to give an adequate review of them. Over one hundred of his papers are recorded in the Royal Society's Catalogue and as many more are to be found in the Photographic Journal and kindred publications. His experimental work lacked nothing for completeness and precision, yet he had little liking for meticulous refinement in research, and his methods were remarkable for their ingenious simplicity. He underrated the advances made (1891) in sensitometry by F. Hurter and V. C. Driffield, yet his Instruction in Photography (1870) and his Treatise on Photography (1875), in their latest editions, still rank among the most valuable photographic textbooks in the English language. His investigations of the problems of colour vision he summarized in his Trichromatic Theory of Colour (1914). He was a keen traveller, and wrote an account of Thebes, and its Five Great Temples (1876) and was joint author, with C. D. Cunningham, of The Pioneers of the Alps (1888).
[Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xcix, A, 1921; Photographic Journal, January 1921; British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1922; The Times, 4 December 1920; personal knowledge.]