Class ^.n\^>4 Book JfeB PRESENTED BY Scanned from the collections of The Library of Congress AUDIO-VISUAL CONSERVATION at Tht LIBRARY of CONGRESS * or Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation www.loc.gov/avconservation Motion Picture and Television Reading Room www.loc.gov/rr/mopic Recorded Sound Reference Center www.loc.gov/rr/record COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY A LIST OF REFERENCES IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY COMPILED BY WILLIAM BURT GAMBLE Chief of the Science and Technology Division WITH INTRODUCTION BY E. J. WALL Associate Editor of "American Photography'' NEW YORK 1924 / COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY A LIST OF REFERENCES IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY WILLIAM BURT GAMBLE Chief of the Science and Technology Division WITH INTRODUCTION BY E. J. WALL Associate Editor of "American Photography" NEW YORK 1924 NOTE This list includes books and periodical articles available in the Reference Depart- ment of The New York Public Library on June 1, 1924. They may be consulted in the Central Building at Fifth Avenue and Forty- second Street. No attempt has been made to cite references to patent records. REPRINTED OCTOBER 1924 FROM THE BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY JUNE. JULY, AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER. 1924 PRINTED AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY form plSS [x-29-24 3c] COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY A LIST OF REFERENCES IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY INTRODUCTION IT is interesting to note that a print in the approximate colors of nature was obtained before photography, as we now understand it, had become an accomplished fact. J. T. Seebeck sent to the poet Goethe a note: "On the chemical action of light and colored illumination," in which he described the reproduction of a spectrum in colors on damp silver chloride. This was pub- lished by Goethe as an appendix to his "Zur Farbenlehre" (Tubingen, 1810, Bd. 2, p. 717). Descriptions of Daguerre's and Fox Talbot's processes of photography were published in 1839. The Seebeck process attracted some attention in the early days, notably from Sir John Herschel, E. Becquerel, Niepce de Saint Victor and Poitevin. But excellent as are the results thus obtainable this process has become more of a pretty laboratory experiment than a working method, because no means have been found of making such pictures permanent. The process is based on the fact that the "subchlorides" of silver, that is, the dark-colored products of the action of light on white silver chloride, assume the colors of the incident light. When silvered plates or homogeneous films of silver subchloride on reflective surfaces are used, the colors are partly due to the formation of silver in laminae, separated from one another by half the wave-length of the incident light. Using paper supports involving no regular reflection, the colors become the so-called "body colors," which may be looked upon as light-formed pig- ments. Fixation of such pictures destroys in the former case the ordered sep- aration of the laminae, and in the latter case the surface color and chemical nature of each body pigment are altered. J. Clerk Maxwell, the famous English physicist, was the first to suggest the possibility of obtaining photographs in natural colors by splitting up the subject into its three component colors, red, green, and blue-violet, in accord- ance with the Young-Helmholtz theory of trichromatic. vision. He actually attempted (Proc. Roy. Soc. 1859, v. 60, p. 404, 484) to reproduce a subject in this manner by photographing it through liquid color filters of the above named hues and projecting transparencies from the negatives through similarly colored filters by means of three lanterns. The result was, of course, but an evanescent picture and by no means perfect, for at that time there was no known means for rendering the silver salts responsive to colors other than blue and violet. Maxwell seems to have confined his attention solely to a projected screen picture. [ 3 ] 4 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY To Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros, two Frenchmen, belongs the honor of having first outlined the possibility of producing prints in colors. Though working quite independently of one another, they practically laid the bases of modern practice, in two papers presented to the Societe Francaise de Photographie on the same day (Bull. Soc. frang. Phot. 1869, tome 15, p. 122, 152). Du Hauron had, however, sent a paper to the Academie des Sciences as early as 1862, in which he outlined his theory, but unfortunately this was re- jected because no proofs of the correctness of his arguments were adduced. The basis of these processes was again the splitting up of the subject into the three fundamental colors and printing from the negatives in the comple- mentary colors. Of recent years all that has been done is the perfection of minor details of the process; the basic facts were determined once for all by the above experimenters, who seem to have been entirely ignorant of Clerk Maxwell's work. The sensitive surfaces of that time were very slow, initially sensitive only to blue, violet and the ultra-violet, and the means for color-sensitizing, which was mainly effected with chlorophyll, not very effective. It was not till H. W. Vogel's discovery of the theory of optical sensitizers (Berichte, 1873, Jahrg. 6, p. 1305) that marked color-sensitivity was possible. Vogel discovered that the addition of certain anilin dyes to a photographic emulsion considerably enhanced its sensitiveness to the less refrangible spectral rays. Up to this time two collodion processes, either the wet or emulsion methods, were alone used, and their comparative insensitiveness was a serious handicap. The introduc- tion of the gelatine plate and the recent discovery of new and much more potent color sensitizers, the isocyanins, have placed all three-color processes on a prac- tical basis. The superposition of aerial colored images, as in the chromoscope, the principle of which was clearly outlined by du Hauron and Cros in their early papers, is by no means sufficient from a practical point of view. A print in colors is the great desideratum and although the many processes so far worked out are in most cases satisfactory, yet the fact that three negatives and three colored superposed pulls are required has undoubtedly militated against the more general adoption of these methods by the average worker, for obviously the chances of failure are increased sixfold. Du Hauron outlined a possible method by means of which the three ex- posures might be reduced to one. This was effected by the application of the three selective color filters in microscopic dimensions to one surface, so as to form a color mosaic of the subject, the color elements being of sufficient minute- ness as to present, when viewed at the distance of normal vision, a homogeneous grey. This is the principle of the screen-plate process, which was brought to perfection by MM. Lumiere in 1907, in their Autochrome plate. In this, potato starch grains, stained in accordance with the theoretical requirements, are dis- tributed over a glass surface, there being approximately 4,000,000 per square inch of surface. This color-mosaic is coated with an emulsion and the camera exposure made through the color grains. The primary negative image thus COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY 5 obtained, which appears in the complementary colors, is dissolved and a posi- tive is obtained in the colors of the original. Here again one meets with the great disadvantage that the results are on glass. Nor is there any really satis- factory method of making paper prints from Autochrome. If more than one result is required a separate exposure has to be made for each. It is true that it is possible to use the mosaic color filters on a separate surface and obtain an ordinary negative, broken up into minute areas of varying density according to the colors of the subject and from this to make any number of glass posi- tives and bind the latter in register with a color mosaic filter and thus obtain satisfactory reproductions; but they are still on glass. The ideal process of color photography would possibly be one which would give us a stable color image in the camera, from which any number of replicas could be made. The feasibility of some such process is proved by the fact that many inorganic and organic colors fade or bleach out under the action of their complementary colored rays. This is a fact known from the very earliest days and many attempts have been made to work out a practicable process, using the brilliant anilin colors as bases. Distinct and marked advances have been made. But even at its best the camera exposures are inordinately long, extending over many hours, and the fact that no means of completely 'fixing' the colors (that is, destroying the fading properties), has made the bleach-out process more of an interesting laboratory experiment than a work-a-day one. Wilhelm Zenker ("Lehrbuch der Photochromie," Berlin, 1868) outlined the possibility of obtaining photographs in natural colors by the regular reflec- tion from silver laminae, deposited in a film at a separation of half the wave- length of the incident light, whereby interference would be set up with color formation. Otto Wiener (Wiedemann's Annal. 1890, Bd. 40, p. 203) proved experimentally that the formation of "standing waves" in a silver emulsion film, by reflection of the incident light back on its own path from a mirror surface, was possible. But to Gabriel Lippmann, of Paris, belongs the honor of having first produced in a grainless film the laminary deposit of metallic silver (Comptes rendus, 1891, tome 112, p.