Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University.
Catherine was the older sister of professor John William Draper, later the founder of the university’s school of medicine. The Drapers worked alongside Samuel Morse in the period following his invention of the telegraph.
The experiments of Draper and Morse, with Catherine as assistant, would set the stage for the entire history of American photography.
The legendary portrait was taken when Miss Draper was a young woman but a renewed interest in the image in the 1890s brought the now elderly matron a bit of late-in-life recognition.
To see the photograph of Draper and other early photography, visit our website.
This episode originally appeared on Greg’s podcast called The First which had a respectable run a few years ago. The feed for that show will be going away soon so we wanted to present some of that show’s greatest hits over the next few months, in between regular episodes of the Bowery Boys as bonus stories about American history. Enjoy!
#251 McGurk's Suicide Hall: The Bowery's Most Notorious Dive
#250 The Empire State Building: Story of an Icon
#249 Madam C.J. Walker: Harlem's Hair Care Millionaire
#248 Sitting Down with Roz Chast of the New Yorker
#247 Rodgers and Hammerstein: The Golden Age of Broadway
#246 Tales from a Tenement: Three Families on the Lower East Side
#245 The Fall of the Fifth Avenue Mansions
#244 The Rise of the Fifth Avenue Mansions
#243 New York In Neon: Signs of the City
#242 New York and the Dawn of Photography
#241 Edgar Allan Poe in New York
#240 The Ghosts of Greenwich Village
#239 Murder at the Manhattan Well
#238 Astoria and Long Island City
#237 Columbus Circle: A Century of Controversy
#236 Times Square in the '70s
The Crash of 1929: New York In Crisis
Queen of the Speakeasies: A Tale of Prohibition New York
#233 The Roaring '20s: King of the Jazz Age
#232 The Story of SoHo
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