Autochrome plate

The invention: The first commercially successful process in which
a single exposure in a regular camera produced a color image.
The people behind the invention:
Louis Lumière (1864-1948), a French inventor and scientist
Auguste Lumière (1862-1954), an inventor, physician, physicist,
chemist, and botanist
Alphonse Seyewetz, a skilled scientist and assistant of the
Lumière brothers
Adding Color
In 1882, Antoine Lumière, painter, pioneer photographer, and father
of Auguste and Louis, founded a factory to manufacture photographic
gelatin dry-plates. After the Lumière brothers took over the
factory’s management, they expanded production to include roll
film and printing papers in 1887 and also carried out joint research
that led to fundamental discoveries and improvements in photographic
development and other aspects of photographic chemistry.
While recording and reproducing the actual colors of a subject
was not possible at the time of photography’s inception (about
1822), the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype,
was able to render both striking detail and good tonal quality. Thus,
the desire to produce full-color images, or some approximation to
realistic color, occupied the minds of many photographers and inventors,
including Louis and Auguste Lumière, throughout the
nineteenth century.
As researchers set out to reproduce the colors of nature, the first
process that met with any practical success was based on the additive
color theory expounded by the Scottish physicist James Clerk
Maxwell in 1861. He believed that any color can be created by
adding together red, green, and blue light in certain proportions.
Maxwell, in his experiments, had taken three negatives through
screens or filters of these additive primary colors. He then took
slides made from these negatives and projected the slides through the same filters onto a screen so that their images were superimposed.
As a result, he found that it was possible to reproduce the exact
colors as well as the form of an object.
Unfortunately, since colors could not be printed in their tonal
relationships on paper before the end of the nineteenth century,Maxwell’s experiment was unsuccessful. Although Frederick E.
Ives of Philadelphia, in 1892, optically united three transparencies
so that they could be viewed in proper alignment by looking through
a peephole, viewing the transparencies was still not as simple as
looking at a black-and-white photograph.
The Autochrome Plate
The first practical method of making a single photograph that
could be viewed without any apparatus was devised by John Joly of
Dublin in 1893. Instead of taking three separate pictures through
three colored filters, he took one negative through one filter minutely
checkered with microscopic areas colored red, green, and
blue. The filter and the plate were exactly the same size and were
placed in contact with each other in the camera. After the plate was
developed, a transparency was made, and the filter was permanently
attached to it. The black-and-white areas of the picture allowed
more or less light to shine through the filters; if viewed froma
proper distance, the colored lights blended to form the various colors
of nature.
In sum, the potential principles of additive color and other methods
and their potential applications in photography had been discovered
and even experimentally demonstrated by 1880. Yet a practical
process of color photography utilizing these principles could
not be produced until a truly panchromatic emulsion was available,
since making a color print required being able to record the primary
colors of the light cast by the subject.
Louis and Auguste Lumière, along with their research associate
Alphonse Seyewetz, succeeded in creating a single-plate process
based on this method in 1903. It was introduced commercially as the
autochrome plate in 1907 and was soon in use throughout the
world. This process is one of many that take advantage of the limited
resolving power of the eye. Grains or dots too small to be recognized
as separate units are accepted in their entirety and, to the
sense of vision, appear as tones and continuous color.Impact
While the autochrome plate remained one of the most popular
color processes until the 1930’s, soon this process was superseded by
subtractive color processes. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky,
both musicians and amateur photographic researchers who eventually
joined forces with Eastman Kodak research scientists, did the
most to perfect the Lumière brothers’ advances in making color
photography practical. Their collaboration led to the introduction in
1935 of Kodachrome, a subtractive process in which a single sheet of
film is coated with three layers of emulsion, each sensitive to one
primary color. A single exposure produces a color image.
Color photography is now commonplace. The amateur market is
enormous, and the snapshot is almost always taken in color. Commercial
and publishing markets use color extensively. Even photography
as an art form, which was done in black and white through
most of its history, has turned increasingly to color.