From his
London home (46 Margaret Street, near Cavendish Square), Ibbetson corresponded with
William Henry Fox Talbot in 1842, having spent some years trying to produce a
lithograph from an original
daguerrotype, writing "I have been going on with experiments in the Callotype & have had some very good results as to depth of Colour." Ten years later, in 1852, Ibbetson exhibited work produced using the Talbot
calotype process, called
Le Premier Livre Imprimè par le Soleil, at a London Society of Arts exhibition. This book, originally published in 1840, was an album of contact prints of ferns, grasses and flowers and used "the independently invented process of
Friedrich Gerber of
Bern, published in January 1839, when Ibbetson was residing in Bern." An enthusiastic geologist, one of Ibbetson's finds on the
Isle of Wight, the fossilised remains of a
Hybodus, was sent to Sir Philip Malpas de Grey Egerton, and was discussed in the Proceedings of the Geological Society in 1845. During the 1840s, Ibbetson was also engaged in various geological surveys associated with the expansion of the British railway system, during which work he corresponded with eminent geologist
Henry Thomas De la Beche. He wrote a book, with contributions from
Edwin Lankester, published around 1852, entitled
Notes on the geology and chemical composition of the various strata in the Isle of Wight ... With a map in relief. With Professor
Edward Forbes, he produced a description of the geology between
Blackgang Chine and Atherfield Point, in the Isle of Wight, for the
Geological Society. In 1851, Levett Ibbetson helped manage the
Great Exhibition. At this event, public toilets were relatively novel, and Ibbetson was given the task of writing an 'Official Report on the Waiting Rooms and Washing Places in the Exhibition Building' - during which he recorded "The largest receipt from the Waiting Rooms was on Wednesday, 8 October 1851 when 11,171 persons made use of them". Ibbetson died at
Biebrich in
Prussia, where he had lived for several years. Some years earlier he presented a valuable collection of fossils to the
Museum of Practical Geology in London. ==Works by L. L. Boscawen Ibbetson==