The Invention of Smiling

Yesterday my wife asked me a question that I had been wondering about myself for quite some time: Why didn't people smile in old pictures?  Since I've never liked to be stumped by one of my wife's random questions, I took a stab at pronouncing the word "daguerreotype" and speculated that the long exposure times that were originally involved in taking a photograph necessitated keeping your face still and relatively expressionless.  I further speculated that this tradition probably persisted for a long time after taking a photograph became a much quicker affair.  A quick Google search of the matter shows that I've scored a direct hit with this answer.  Either that, or someone else came up with the same dumb idea that I did.  Nevertheless, the real question now becomes: When was the trend reversed?  When did people start smiling in old photographs?

Well, my exhaustive and notoriously thorough research led me to a man by the name of Dr. Karl Bruegger.  Dr. Bruegger was a Bavarian dentist who had immigrated to America and set up a private dental practice in the late 19th century.  One day an eager young photographer was admiring the photographs which lined the walls of Dr. Bruegger's office, portraits of the dentist's patients proudly displaying their healthy white teeth.  What struck the young photographer, however, was not the quality of the dental work, but rather the blissful expression that the teeth-baring pose lent to the subject's faces.

When the photographer asked about the oddly charming expression in the portraits, Dr. Bruegger was obligingly eager to explain his technique for obtaining the unique pose.  He began by drilling a small but precise hole in the subject's skull.  Then he would proceed to poke around in the hole with some of his surgical instruments, removing a few excess cubic inches of brain tissue.  The subject would then lapse into a state of stupefaction.  Their mouths would hang loose, showing their teeth, and the blissful expression that the photographer had observed in the photographs would settle over their faces.  It was a quite simple procedure, as the dentist kindly demonstrated for the photographer on the next patient that arrived that afternoon.

It became known as the Bruegger Technique, and it soon became popular in photo studios through-out the world.  World leaders, famous celebrities, and rich debutantes all lined up to have their "Bruegger Holes" drilled.  After undergoing the procedure, one high society lady was quoted as saying, "uhhhh..."  The procedure was a rousing success, but it seems that the word "smile" did not appear until 1914 in a book by Samuel Westabahn called Plasticity and the Human Form.  Westabahn proposed an alternative method to the Bruegger Technique, which had been showing a distinct loss of effectiveness over time.  Drilling new Bruegger holes wasn't helping.  One man had had sixteen such holes drilled and his face hung slack and loose and he was quite unresponsive.  The "Westabahn Method" dispensed with the barbaric drilling of holes in the subject's skulls.  Instead, Westabahn administered a heavy dose of arsenic to his subjects.  After a fairly uncooperative struggle, the subject's heart and breathing would eventually stop and they would settle into a state which Westabahn called "the period of plasticity."  At the this point, the features could be manipulated into the proper expression which would finally solidify once rigor mortis set in.  A special liquid solution dropped in each eye would given them the proper sparkle and the whole procedure would "achieve the desired pose known as the 'smile.'"  However, it's not clear where Westabahn first heard this term.

Eventually, sometime during the 1920's, photographers learned that the same expression could be prompted simply by asking their subjects to say "cheese" before take the photo, and the rest is history...more or less.