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1866–1881, floor instance; patent search 2026
Joseph H. Dille (b. near Cleveland, Ohio, 1832, of Alsace-Lorraine parentage; d. Amelia, Ohio, 1918) worked in Fort Wayne 1866–1869, first with Augustus C. Crane at 136 Columbia, then alone at 44 Calhoun, opposite the courthouse; he later painted from photographs. Elisha W. Poston (b. ca. 1833, Ohio) was a Fort Wayne house carpenter in 1870 and a photographer 1874–1881 at the same 44 Calhoun address, where John F. Aber, working there 1875–76, styled himself a "solar photographer." Dille and Poston together held a United States patent for an "improvement in solar-cameras" — the solar camera being the era's enlarging apparatus — and sold it to John A. Shoaff in 1872. Beatty documents the patent and the sale from American Photographic Patents, 1840–1880; the patent's number was not retrieved, and that number is a named gap, settled by that volume or by the USPTO assignment records. Poston's own eye survives: his 1878–79 rooftop views of the city are held by the History Center, Fort Wayne.
The residence sweep the table orders was run and is negative. Full-text patent searching (Google Patents and web indexes of the USPTO record) by inventor residence — Granger, Indiana; Harris Township; Clay Township — returned no camera or photographic patent held by a resident of the ground in any era; the hits were unrelated inventors in other states. The floor's inventor-photographers were city men, and no township resident joins them in the patent record as searched. That is a tested negative over the searches named, not a proof that no township tinkerer ever filed: the settling sources for a deeper pass are the USPTO's assignment and gazette indexes under the township names themselves.