Page 49 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 49/146
Colour Photography
There are other major expansions of photography around this period (1900-1920). Perhaps the most important of these is the development of a successful colour photographic process. This depended on the success of the theory of trichromatic colour, proposed by James Clerk Maxwell, Hermann von Helmholtz and Thomas Young 40 years previously:
James Clerk Maxwell: Trichromatic Theory of Colour Vision 1861.
This was the breakthrough theory. With Thomas Young’s 1902 Theory of light and colours, and fur- ther work by Hermann von Helmholtz on the human eye’s photo-receptors - defining the wavelengths that the red, green and blue-responsive cones in the retina react to - Maxwell was able to define his quantitative theory of colour by 1861. One of the first material results was his experi- ment in photographing a coloured tartan ribbon (centre, top), using panchromatic monochrome film, he made three transparencies through red, green and blue filters. When superimposed and viewed against a light-source, the full colour of the original ribbon was apparent. This was the first ever colour photograph. Within a generation or so, Maxwell’s theory sparked Impressionism (1872) and Pointillism (1884), trichromatic colour printing (1882), and the Lumiere’s commercial colour system: the beautiful Autochrome (1903-1935).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell