Contemporary accounts suggest that Gage's personality was dramatically altered because his appearance was made grotesque by the accident, but the new image, to be published online next week by the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, shows a relatively handsome man -- supporting the belief of most experts that damage to his brain accounted for the changed personality. Gage was the 25-year-old foreman of a railroad construction crew that was preparing a railroad bed outside Cavendish, Vt., on Sept. 13, 1848. As usual, he was using a 3-foot-7-inch-long, 13 1/4-pound pointed iron rod to tamp gunpowder and sand into a hole drilled in rock. That day, the mixture exploded, sending the rod through his left cheek and out through the top of his head. It was successfully removed and, to the surprise of physicians, Gage lived 11 more years, eventually dying from a series of increasingly violent convulsions. His story is a showpiece in neurology texts and folklore both because of his survival and the abrupt changes in his personality. The daguerreotype has been in the possession of Jack and Beverly Wilgus for 30 years, although they do not know its origin. They had thought it was an image of a whaler holding a harpoon, but whaling experts viewing it online told them it was not. An anonymous tipster suggested it was Gage. Intrigued, the Wilguses compared their image with that of a life mask at Harvard University's Warren Anatomical Museum and found it could be superimposed perfectly, with scars lining up correctly. Writing on the metal rod that appears in the image matches writing on the iron rod held at the Warren Museum. The images can be viewed at brightbytes.com/phineasgage. (Optional add end) The daguerreotype photographic process, introduced in 1839, captures an image on a polished silver plate coated with iodine and then bromine. After being exposed, it is developed with fumes from heated mercury, then fixed with a solution of hyposulphite of soda. The process was in common use until the mid-1850s. At the height of its popularity, an estimated 3 million images per year were produced in the United States. 