Following on from my trying to work out when we started calling photographs photographs, I though I’d use the Google Ngram viewer one more type to look at the relative usage of the following terms for photographs over the period 1840 to 1880:

The terms I checked were:

• daguerreotype
• calotype
• ambrotype
• tintype
• collodion (the name of the wet plate process)
• photograph

The results were a little surprising

while daguerreotype was indeed the most common term before 1855, the term collodion, as in collodion process was a pretty common term.

I then checked to see if the term collodion process was the term actually in use

which it clearly wasn’t.

What this means I’m not sure, I’ll have to go and look at usages of collodion in context …