Michael Pakenham Edgeworth. - Early photography, Public domain image

Edgeworth was born in 1812 in County Longford, Ireland.The son of a wealthy landowner, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied natural history. In 1834 he joined the British East India Company as an assistant surgeon and was posted to Bengal. During his time in India, Edgeworth developed a keen interest in botany and began to collect plant specimens from all over the country. He sent many of these specimens back to Europe, where they were studied by the leading botanists of the day. Edgeworth's most important contribution to botany was his work on ferns. He collected and described many new species of ferns from India and Sri Lanka, and his two-volume 'Ferns of British India', published in 1856, is still considered a classic in the field. In addition to his botanical work, Edgeworth was also a pioneer of photography. He learned the technique from John Herschel, a leading British scientist, and began experimenting with it in the early 1840s.He produced some of the earliest photographs of India and was one of the first photographers to use the calotype process.Edgeworth retired from the East India Company in 1856 and returned to Ireland.He continued to work on botany and photography and published several more books on these subjects. He died in 1881, aged 69. Today Edgeworth is remembered as one of the most important botanists of the 19th century and a pioneer of photography. Many of the plant species he described are still known by his name, including Edgeworthia chrysantha, a flowering plant native to China and Nepal.