Today, the first color photographs. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Color is such an
overwhelming sensual experience. I sit at my desk
in the muted natural light of morning, my eye
tracing the subtle shadings of color -- book covers
with dozens of browns, splashes of off-reds and
greens -- wooden cases stained rust, off-white
walls, colors that clash, mesh, and goad thought.
The French Academy of Sciences announced Daguerre's new photographic
process to the world in 1839. Daguerreotypes had
been in the works for over a decade. Now they
marched into the marketplace with the full
imprimatur of modern science. And the first
question people asked was, "When will we have
color?"
A cottage industry of hand-painted Daguerreotypes
sprang up immediately. But people reacted much the
way I reacted when I saw a colorized version of the
fine black and white movie, Casablanca, on TV. It
broke my heart to see the delicacies of shading in
the original replaced with such revolting kitsch.
People quickly saw that you can't fake real color.
Besides, the demand for color outran our knowledge
of chemistry. When color film finally reached the
market in the 1930's, we'd been trying to develop
it for a century.
One myth of early color photography holds that the
Rev. Levi Hill, of Westkill, New York, invented it
as early as 1850. That seems too preposterous to
take seriously, but art historian Joseph Boudreau
looks more closely at Hill. When Hill announced his
process, he was visited by a group from the New
York Daguerrean Association. They told him to keep
quiet or they'd wreck his lab. Daguerreotypes were
becoming obsolete and they feared for their
livelihood.
Hill bought a revolver and a mean guard dog, and he
forged ahead. People like Samuel F. B. Morse
inspected his work and declared it sound. In 1856,
Hill published a rambling account of what he now
called the Hillotype process. But he also used the
book to attack the Daguerrean Association. They, in
turn, got a court order requiring all copies of the
book to be destroyed.
Hill nevertheless gave up the ministry to go
full-time into photography. He suffered chronic
bronchitis and believed that inhaling the fumes of
photographic chemicals helped him. The fumes soon
killed him, and he passed into photographic
mythology.
Boudreau found a surviving copy of Hill's book and
set about to replicate the process. It was long and
difficult, but it actually worked. He managed to
produce some dingy, but distinct, color
Daguerreotypes. Hill had actually succeeded -- 80
years too soon.
When I saw the first color photos and movies in the
1930s, I didn't like their gaudy distortion of
reality's much gentler colors. Boudreau's pictures,
made with Hill's process, at least have some
restraint. Of course his process was too complex to
be practical, but he really had done it -- and far,
far ahead of its time.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
