Joseph Bancroft Reade FRS FRMS (5 April 1801 – 12 December 1870) was an English clergyman, amateur scientist and pioneer of photography.
His father, Thomas Shaw Bancroft Reade (1776–1841), was a merchant and Christian pamphleteer who actively supported the British and Foreign Bible Society.
[1] John Lee and the Royal Astronomical Society jointly owned the advowson of the parish of Stone, Buckinghamshire and they appointed Reade vicar in 1839.
His first scientific paper in 1836 was on the use of a pair of convex lenses to focus light on a microscopic specimen without overheating.
[3] Reade was interested in chemistry and botany, performing microscopic investigations of various specimens including microfossils.
[6] Reade began experimenting with light-sensitive substances in a solar microscope, for the intensity of the light it projected to produce images of small transparent objects.
[1] In fact, Reade erred in making the latter broad statement, as the earlier Daguerreotype process also involved the chemical development of an initially invisible latent image.