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Stereo-Autochrome colour slide c1920 https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/05/how-potatoes-and-gelatin-created-color-photography/
Albert Kahn: Planetary Archive - 1908-1931.
The Lumiere Brothers had invented the first successful colour-photographic process in 1903, and
by 1907 it was in the marketplace. One of the first major investors was the wealthy French financier, philanthropist and internationalist Albert Kahn. Kahn had an idealistic vision - to create an ‘Archive de la Planete’ - a photographic archive of the entire planet - documenting every country in colour photography and in motion pictures, with the aim of promoting world peace. He poured huge sums of money into this project between 1908 and 1929, when the Stock Market crash brought an end to his dream. In the 21 years of the project, Kahn commissioned photographers to take documentary images all over the World (not so easy to travel around in those days),gradually acquiring over 72,000 colour images, most of them using the beautiful Autochrome process. What a grand project this, and was. It’s now housed in the Albert Kahn Institute near Paris. It’s a project with as grand a vision as Paul Otlet’s Mundunaeum, or Herbert George Wells: The World Brain. With our recently acquired Global Village sensibility, we have grown used to world-wide phenomena like Globalisa- tion, and the World Wide Web, (as well as global telecoms, global media, global finance, satellite imaging etc), but Albert Kahn’s prescient vision of a Planetary Archive back in 1908 is truly breath- taking, as is the scale of his generous philanthropy over more than twenty years. Kahn realised back in the early years of the last century, that photography would capture the otherwise fleeting moments of a world in rapid transition into Modernity. Images would capture and preserve a record of how the world changed as World Wars, Air Travel, Radio, and Telecommunications began to shrink it and ‘modernise’ it. It is interesting that Kahn’s