James Ambrose Cutting

Ambrotypes (black-backed collodion positives) are reported to have been made at least as early as 1852 by Frederick Scott Archer (see Schimmelman).

Although Cutting, the patent holder, had named the process after himself, it appears the term, "ambrotype" itself may have been first coined in the gallery of Marcus Aurelius Root, a well-known daguerreotypist, as documented in the 1864 book The Camera and the Pencil.

[1] Patent Numbers 11,213, 11,266 and 11,267: Awarded to James Ambrose Cutting of Boston, Massachusetts in 1854 for creating collodion positive photographs on glass.

"This magnificent display of one of the most fascinating phenomena of nature is now open for public exhibition," announced the Boston Post.

Distraught over the conversion of the Aquarial Gardens into an amusement hall, Cutting suffered a nervous collapse, from which he never recovered; he died in August 1867 in an insane asylum in Worcester, MA.