The Professor of Magic: Science, Love, Death, and Daguerreotypes (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798328606516)

In 1840, Eben Norton Horsford was known as "The Professor of Magic" by the students at the Albany Female Academy, and for good reason. He was something of a wizard. Horsford instructed his young scholars in the strange alchemy of chemistry. But he was also a phrenologist who could read their character by feeling the contours beneath their ringlets. As a practitioner of the quasi-occult science of animal magnetism, Horsford conjured their imaginations, and as an astronomer, he introduced them to the heavens from his rooftop observatory.

Eben Horsford was also one of a select few who knew how to create a daguerreotype- the newborn but sometimes deadly photographic miracle that could capture their youthful faces upon a silver plate, as if stolen from a looking-glass. It was all so magical. In what amounted to the romantic hot house of the Female Academy, could any of the girls be blamed for entertaining thoughts of the most romantic sort? As a young man of 22, could Horsford resist falling in love with at least one of them?

The Professor of Magic is an extraordinary account of the dawn of photography, pseudo-scientific disciplines of the 19th century, early women's education in America, and a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant but complex young man in the middle of it all.