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Western researchers used detailed micro-x-ray scans – completed at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York – to precisely map how the mercury is laid out on the plate, exposing the ultra-detailed image hiding beneath the grime.

“When we were able to get such resolution of those images beneath the tarnish, it was shocking. We were all thrilled with the outcome,” said Madalena Kozachuk, a Western PhD student and lead author of the paper. “We have many different opportunities to expand this work.”

Other methods of restoring daguerreotypes have had limited success, Kozachuk said. Sometimes trying to clean up the plates has done more damage than good.

The detailed digital scans, which take eight hours to complete a single 7.5 centimetre wide plate, are a non-invasive way to study the historic relics.

“From a historical perspective, having these images now viewable. . . opens a whole new area of discovery,” she said. “You can recover portions of history that either were unknown or were thought to be lost.”

Kozachuk and her team tested the method out on two plates from the National Gallery of Canada’s photography research unit. The two portraits, of an unknown man and an unidentified woman, may date from as early as 1850, before Canada was even a country.

The two shots – and the potentially hundreds of thousands like it around the world – are a rare glimpse into what exactly the world looked like in the mid-1800s.

“They even had a term, daguerreo-mania when it first popped up,” she said. “These were really integral to the frontier idea of a new nation. . . It was a whole other realm of possibility. Before that there was no exact representation of reality. This was a whole new construct for them to wrap their head around.”

Kozachuk’s research published last week in Scientific Reports.