Did the inventor of the Stanley Steamer car also build The Shining hotel and discover dry plate photography?

Well yes.

The Stanley brothers were geniuses. But I never knew about them until recently.

A few weeks ago I flew to Estes Park, Colorado, for a friend’s 40th birthday party. The location was beautiful– as was the hotel where the event was held. Does the historic Stanley Hotel ring a bell?

Well, if you’re a Stephen King fan or a devotee of the Sci-Fi channel you may recognize the place. It is infamous for being haunted and the inspiration for King’s book The Shining. One year the Travel Channel named it the most haunted hotel in America.

I believe it. I captured lots of ghostly orbs on my Nikon digital camera during my tour of the grounds. And I felt that freaky energy. Joshua, our tour guide, explained to us, manner-of-factly, his own dealings with the so-called “permanent residents” of the Stanley Hotel.

King claims his one-night stay at the place was full of other-worldly encounters and freed him from a writer’s block. Later, his popular book The Shining, inspired from his stay, was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson. But to King’s chagrin, the location for the 1970s Stanley Kubrick film wasn’t the Stanley Hotel. And the movie wasn’t true to the book.

So, in 1995, King directed his own Shining version, an ABC mini-series that represented the book and it was filmed at the Stanley. Candid photos from the making of the film line some of the hotel’s walls, strangely juxtaposed to some other really large, old, beautiful black and white photos. That’s when I discovered the hotel’s rich history and its strong link to photography.

Like a beacon of hope, the stark white hotel stands on a cliff overlooking the picturesque town of Estes Park, surrounded by the snow-capped Rocky Mountains. It was built by Freelan O. (F.O.) Stanley, one-half of the famous inventor twins, for his wife. How’d he get all that money to charm his wife with a fancy hotel?

I learned F.O. and his brother Francis E. (F.E.) were the inventors of the Stanley Steamer car and dry plate photography, among many other things. They formed the Stanley Dry Plate Company to manufacture the dry plates in 1883. The twins received a patent in 1886 for inventing a machine for manufacturing the dry plates. They sold the company to Eastman Kodak in 1903 and made a bundle.

The Stanley Hotel is a monument to this process. Antiquated, but detailed dry plate black-and-white photos are peppered throughout the hotels walls, adding to the place’s mystique. Some believe the invention by the Stanley brothers was what prompted their little sister, Chansonetta, to become a talented photographer. The Stanley Hotel’s official story is that invention was born out of watching their sister’s frustration with the wet plate process—that the enterprising brothers wanted an easier process for their sister, an aspiring photographer.

The dry plate process, which involves a glass plate coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver bromide, could be stored until exposure, and after exposure it can be brought back to a darkroom for development at leisure. These qualities were great advantages back then over the wet plate process. Wet plates had to be prepared just before exposure and developed immediately afterwards.

Whichever came first, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons gained fame in her own right, as one of the first female photographers in the country. Her images depict rural American life at the turn-of-the-century. She also captured many landscapes and Maine life. Today, there are many books devoted to her and her work has been exhibited nationally.

Underneath the photo of Chansonetta below are two of priceless photos as exhibited on the walls of the Stanley and a picture of the Stanley Hotel today.

[Unfortunately, I had to contend with a significant amount of glare (or maybe it was the ghosts…) on the glass. But notice the details despite subjects having to stand still for at least 15 minutes until each photograph was fully exposed.] –a.s.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Alysha Sideman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.