Early Colour Photography

[paulatukcamera]

Tonight I stumbled upon a real photographic mystery story. I hope some of you will get as much pleasure as I did, reading about the strange case of Mr Levi Hill, inventor of the Colour Daguerreotype - in 1850!

If you have not heard of him before, the following should prove an interesting read:

About the man - Catskill Mountain Magazine

The Boston Globe's account of the experiments upon Hill's colour daguerreotypes

The Hillotypes

A 160 year old photographic mystery - Smithsonian

The Photographs at the Smithsonian

If you stumble upon any further interesting articles, could you please publish them here.

Thanks

Paul

[mickeyobe]

Paul,

I have read everything you sent.

Hill was an intriguing character but I am sceptical about his colour pictures.

He may have thought he was producing colour photos but I am inclined to think the colours were produced by the careful application of a paint brush with any of the coloured toning chemicals such as gold, & sulphocyanide (reds to browns to purples), potassium ferricyanide & ferric amonium citrate (blues to greens) and so on.

Mickey (I am no expert, just a sceptic.)

[PeterW]

Like Mickey I am inclined to be a little sceptic about Hill's claims. After looking at all the links Paul posted I believe Hill produced Daguerrotypes with some colour tint, but that these were chemically-induced colour tints, not the colours of nature. It's a great pity Hill didn't document each stage of his experiments.

As Mickey pointed out – and this takes me back years and years to my college lectures on the chemistry of metals – you can get a blue tint by using a mixture of potassium ferricyanide and ammonium ferric citrate. You can also get browns and purples by using diffferent proportions of Potassium ferricyanide and potassium ferrocyanide. The tints are often known as “Turnbull's Blue”. It's the basic chemistry of the old engineering blueprint.

If these chemicals are mixed with the silver iodide or silver bromo-iodide on the Daguerrotype plate they will give the emulsion a colour tint which, like the developed emulsion itself, will vary in depth according to the the amount of light that falls on it.

So I believe that, in a way, Hill did produce Daguerrotypes with chemical colour tints of a sort.
But he was not the first to do so.

In the UK and on the Euopean mainland experiments such as these were carried out by various chemists and physicists from about 1840 onwards but were never put forward as commercial processes because of their poor colours and uncertain quality.

One of the experimenters was the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In the mid 1850s he had progressed to using colour emulsions but could not manage to fix the colours. They soon faded away. However, in 1861 he produced what is generally regarded as the first permanent “fixed” colour photograph of a tartan ribbon. You can see a reproduction of it on wikipedia by asking Google for “early colour photography”

PeterW

[photax]

Hi Paul !

I just had a look at the German version of Brian Coe`s book “ Colour Photography / the first hundred years “. It includes a section about Mr. Hill: In 1851 he claimed that he had invented a colour process using Daguerrotype-plates. He promised the public, that he would reveal the mystery by publishing a book. The subscription price was 5.- Dollar. He finally earned 15.000.- Dollar. The “book” turned out as a cheap printed copy describing the Daguerrotype-plates process expanded by many complicated chemical formulas relating to the plate development. He showed the “Hillotypes” to very few persons, one of them said ( 1864 ): I looked at the picture with a magnifier and found out that it was a usual coloured Daguerrotype, the powder paint ( sorry if this is not the correct English word ) was clearly identifiable. It is simply a trick to make a lot of money and he used the title “Reverend” to appear honest…

MIK

[paulatukcamera]

Now come on Gentlemen, you have found the aforesaid Levy guilty of "misrepresentation" and completely ignored the following

That in 1987 Boudreau of the College of Art attempted to reproduce the process and succeeded!

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.- John Lienhard, at the University of Houston

from "Wikipedia"

Photography professor and historian Joseph Boudreau compounded the archaic chemistry and replicated the techniques described by Hill in A Treatise on Heliochromy in 1981, and was able to recreate Hillotype plates in distinct, verifiable, muted colors, including red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, and orange; these colors were all produced by the action of light alone, without the application of dyes or pigments

From the Dagerrian |Society, the exact title.

Boudreau, Joseph. "Color Daguerreotypes: Hillotypes Recreated," in Pioneers of Photography, ed. Eugene Ostroff. (Springfield, VA: Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers, 1987,) pp. 189-199. This somewhat technical essay discusses the Hill controversy and charts Boudreau's successful working through Hill's Treatise on Heliocromy; clearly some of the most important daguerreian research of our time.

Anybody going to follow this up?

You do want the truth don't you?

Paul

[mickeyobe]

"Anybody going to follow this up?
You do want the truth don't you?"

Yes Paul. Out of curiosity I am going to try to locate it on the internet and read it. I am not sure I will understand it. But I'll try.

But surely you cannot expect me to replicate the experiment. I might blow up my entire neighbourhood and alienate my neighbours.

Mickey

[daveh]

Things will always prove what whatever someone wants them to prove. The fact that someone else came along and achieved a result, using much of Hill's work, does not necessarily mean that Hill himself was ever successful. Neither does the fact that Hill wrote a book necessarily mean that everything written in it was in fact all his own work. I know plenty of modern day plagiarists, and there were many around in that era too, especially if there were a few bob to be made.

Of course Boudreau might have succeeded because of knowledge collected over many years: one can't unlearn something to put oneself properly into Hill's shoes.

I am reminded of the story of the first ascent of a mountain (I'll have to try to find all the details - they are in a book "First Ascents" by Eric Newby, which I lent to someone, but never got it back) which I think was in South America. There was an Italian mountaineer who claimed he had climbed it in a day free-climbing with one companion, who was unfortunately killed. The climbing cognoscenti did not believe him. He went back the following year with a huge team of people and virtually built a roadway up the mountain. He did the first ascent, but not perhaps how he originally claimed.

So did he, Hill, do it? Had he been a person who eschewed the limelight and who had sought to gain neither financial benefit nor fame, I would be more inclined to believe (or at least want to believe) he had done it.

For me, if he had really succeeded he would have made much more of it. He was probably close, but would seem to have chosen to "cheat" to make people believe he had done it. He wouldn't be the first who had been able to con experts, and he certainly wasn't the last.

Final analysis: who knows?