John Carbutt

Life & Legacy

John Carbutt (December 2, 1832– July 26, 1905) was an English photographer and businessman. He created stereograms of his excursions in Minnesota, along the Mississippi River, Niagara Falls, and the Rocky Mountains. He worked as a photographer for the Grand Trunk Railway and the Chicago and North Western Railway. He was the official photographer of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad during the construction of their transcontinental railroad lines.
In 1879, he founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works. He was an innovator in the development of photographic plates and the first to commercially produce gelatin dry plates in the United States. He was the first to produce celluloid film of high quality for photographic use. This film was provided to William Kennedy Dickson and Thomas Edison for usage in their Kinetoscope.