Photography, Scientific Discovery, and Narrative Invention in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Other Tales

During the early 1840s, Poe established several new forms of short fiction, including the detective story, the locked-room mystery, and a peculiar kind of horror tale, whose protagonist is either obsessed with capturing visual images or haunted by their uncanny reproduction. With “The Gold-Bug,” Poe recombined elements of those genres even as he invented two more: the cryptographic mystery and the tale of finding buried treasure. All of these innovations were partly inspired by Louis Daguerre’s recent discovery of a chemical process that not only recorded reflections appearing in a camera obscura but also engraved them, as if by magic, on metal plates, thus making photography possible. In “The Gold-Bug,” at every level of the text, Poe elaborated on the idea of disclosing previously hidden, invisible, unseen sights. He also made Legrand’s similar discovery—a method for developing latent images through a chemical reaction—nearly inseparable from the fantastic stories that could be told about it. Poe’s famous tale of pirate treasure thus demonstrates his familiarity with an important development in nineteenth-century science, his use of this knowledge to devise new literary forms, and his awareness of the connection between scientific progress and popular storytelling about inventions and discoveries. Later, in “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” and other satires, Poe showed even more clearly how advances in technology lead to narrative invention.