The New Murrey and Blue blog

Last year, we brought you the news that the developers of the Stanley knife were descended from Thomas, Baron Stanley, subsequently Earl of Derby. Now we can announce that a great scientist and inventor was a Talbot, authentically descended from John “Old Talbot”, Earl of Shrewsbury and posthumous father-in-law to Edward IV.

William Henry Fox Talbot was already a mathematician and member, from 1831, of the Royal Society for his work on integral calculus when he began to work on the introduction of photography, finally demonstrating a practical system to the Royal Institution in January 1839. Through his use of “salted paper”, images could be developed and this enabled Fox Talbot to be granted the patent for his “calotype” ahead of Louis Daguerre, whose system was very different. Fox Talbot eventually discovered other, better, photographic methods and worked on subjects as diverse as spectral analysis and Assyriology.

As this genealogy shows, his Talbot genealogy is simple although not through a direct paternal line as that surname was reassumed at least once through an heiress. In fact, the younger Sherrington Talbot, who died in 1677, was Fox Talbot’s ancestor three times through cousin marriages but would not share his Y-chromosome. His mother was the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester, a descendant of Anne, Duchess of Exeter.