[Ads-l] Antedating of "Infrared"

[Chris Waigl]

Hi Fred,

This is great - the electromagnetic spectrum is something I teach, and
having some historical texture to the topic helps.

I poked at the titles you cited in Google Books a little more and found
quite a few mentions of M. de Saint-Florent in the tables of
contents, mostly for a color photography process he apparently invented. He
shows up as "E. de Saint-Florent" and "Lieut.-Col. de Saint-Florent". I
then looked in the catalogue of the French national library, but the only
name that is from approximately the right time is Alfred Vignaud Dupuy de
Saint-Florent, a medical doctor born in 1868 who wrote a treatise about I
think Huntington's disease or a similar neurological affliction ("La chorée
congénitale"). "Alfred" would be the (first) given name, and "Vignaud Dupuy
de Saint-Florent" the family name. Big-ass nobility. The family seems to
still exist. There's, going backwards, a Napoleonian general
called François Dupuy de Saint-Florent 1772-1838 who, according to this bio
http://nieuletalentoursenlimousin.fr/archive/militaires-francois-dupuy-de-st-florent/
adopted a nephew called Antoine Télesphore Vignaud, and I guess it's his
descendents who go by the mouthful Vignaud Dupuy de Saint-Florent.

Anyhoo, none of this tells us who E. was. This page
https://www.mesarchitecture.org/infrared.html follows your footsteps,
probably, but must have some extra sources: "The phrase infra-rouge was
translated into English as “infrared” in 1874, in a translation of an
article by Vignaud Dupuy de Saint-Florent (1830-1907), an engineer within
the French army, who attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and who
pursued pictures as a pastime."

Chris



On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 7:13 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> The OED's first use of the term "infrared" is dated 1881.  The letter
> below, which I am not sure where I got it from, traces it back to 1874.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
> In “Herschel and the Puzzle of Infrared” (May–June 2012), Jack White
> mentions that it is not known who coined the term “infrared.” This mystery
> caught my attention. A Google Books search for “infra-red” finds two
> articles published in April 1874, both of which use the term in the context
> of Edmond Becquerel’s treatise on light. In that work, La Lumière (1867,
> vol. 1, p. 141), the French infra-rouge is used. One of the articles
> appeared in The Photographic News for Amateur Photographers (18:176), and
> is by M. de St. Florent; the other is uncredited but appeared in The
> British Journal of Photography (21:160) and is attributed to de St. Florent
> elsewhere in the volume. I have not been able to trace de St. Florent’s
> full name, but he published contemporaneously in Bulletin de la Société
> française de photographie. This author appears to be the coiner of
> “infra-red,” having translated it from French.
>
> There are two curious sidelights to this story: Becquerel was the father
> of Henri Becquerel, for whom the unit of radioactivity was named; and the
> term “ultraviolet” was coined by William Herschel’s son John Herschel in
> 1840.
>
> Gary Rosenberg
>
> Academy of Natural Sciences
>
> Drexel University
>
> Philadelphia, PA
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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