Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson

Who was Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson?

Captain Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson was an English 19th century geologist, inventor, organiser and soldier. He is particularly associated with early developments in photography, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

From his London home, Ibbetson corresponded with William Henry Fox Talbot in 1842, having spent some years trying to produce a lithograph from an original daguerrotype, writing "I have been going on with experiments in the Callotype & have had some very good results as to depth of Colour." Ten years later, in 1852, Ibbetson exhibited work produced using the Talbot calotype process, called Le Premier Livre Imprimè par le Soleil, at a London Society of Arts exhibition. This book, originally published in 1840, was an album of contact prints of ferns, grasses and flowers and used "the independently invented process of Friedrich Gerber of Berne, published in January 1839, when Ibbetson was residing in Berne."

An enthusiastic geologist, one of Ibbetson's finds on the Isle of Wight, the fossilised remains of a Hybodus, was sent to Sir Philip Malpas de Grey Egerton, and was discussed in the Proceedings of the Geological Society in 1845.