The advent of the albumen print process in the early 1850s meant that photography became a medium of mass visual communication in the hands of early entrepreneurs and from the mid 1850s onwards who produced semi-industrial quantities of copies of pictures from commissioned photographers, processing thousands of prints a month by hundreds of employees. Ponti photographed, and commissioned others, to produce specially prepared photographs for use in the Megalethoscope, distributing all the imagery with his own stamp, so that attribution is often contended.
