James Clerk Maxwell's projection of
Tartan ribbon by the triple color projection method
First color photo
(credit: AWM)
A very weathy and powerful Scottish physicist called James Clerk Maxwell creates a rudimentary color image by superimposing three black-and-white images onto a single screen, each passed through three different color filters; red, green, and blue. His photo of a multicolored ribbon was the first to prove the efficacy of the three-color method which was until then just a theory, and the initial stepping stone to further color innovation.
The first color photograph made according to Maxwell's prescription, by three "color separations," was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for use in illustrating a lecture on color by Maxwell, where it was shown in color by the triple color projection method. Although physicist Maxwell himself noticed the results were very imperfect possibly as result of the insensitivity of available photographic materials to red and green light. Furthermore, researchers a century later noted that the "red" and "green" images were probably due entirely to light from the blue-violet-ultraviolet region of the spectrum which was not adequately blocked by Sutton's red and the green filters.James C. Maxwell suggestion of 1855 and the resulting defective 1861 demonstration were apparently forgotten until being brought to light again in the 1890s. However, in the following decades, the basic concept was independently re-invented by several people, although usually with same the serious error, arising from centuries of artists' experience with pigments, that red, yellow, and blue were the required filter colors.
Thomas Sutton (1819-1875) was an English photographer, author, and inventor. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1846 as the twenty-seventh Wrangler. He opened a photographic studio in Jersey the following year under the patronage of Prince Albert. In 1855 he set up a photographic company in Jersey with business partner Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard that produced prints from calotype negatives. The following year, Sutton and Blanquart-Evrard founded the journal "Photographic Notes", which Sutton edited for eleven years. A prolific author, Sutton wrote a number of books on the subject of photography, including the Dictionary of Photography in 1858.
In 1859, Sutton developed the earliest panoramic camera with a wide-angle lens. The lens consisted of a glass sphere filled with water, which projected an image onto a curved plate. The camera was capable of capturing an image in a 120 degree arc. Another photographic development was the first Single Lens Reflex camera, in 1861. He was also the photographer for James Clerk Maxwell's early experiments in color photography and in 1861 took the world's first permanent color photograph of a Tartan ribbon. Maxwell directed Sutton to take three photographs of the ribbon, through a red, green, and blue filter, respectively. The plates were developed and projected on a screen by three projectors, each with the same color filter used to take its photograph. When brought together in focus, a full-color image was formed. He also worked on the development of dry photographic plates.
(Reproduced with the permission of the John O'Connor, St Andrew University.)
James C. Maxwell Biography:
On the 13th June 1831 James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, at 14 India Street, a house built for his father in that part of Edinburgh's elegant Georgian New Town which was developed after the Napoleonic Wars. Although the family moved to their estate at Glenlair, near Dumfries, shortly afterwards, James returned to Edinburgh to attend school at The Edinburgh Academy.
Maxwell continued his education at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. In 1856, at the early age of 25, he became Professor of Physics at Marischal College, Aberdeen. From there he moved first to King's College, London, and then, in 1871, to become the first Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge where he directed the newly created Cavendish Laboratory. It was at the Cavendish, over the next fifty years, that so much of the physics of today continued to develop from Maxwell's inspiration.
So much of our technology in the world today stems from his grasp of basic principles of the universe. Wide ranging developments in the field of electricity and electronics, including radio, television, radar and communications, derive from Maxwell's discovery - which was not a synthesis of what was known before, but rather a fundamental change in concept that departed from Newton's view and was to influence greatly the modern scientific and industrial revolution.
Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. His mother had died at the same age of the same cancer. Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in Galloway, Scotland. The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former school-fellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882 and his collected works, including the series of articles on the properties of matter, such as "Atom", "Attraction", "Capillary action", "Diffusion", "Ether", etc., were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890.James Clerk Maxwell was one of the greatest scientists who have ever lived. He was the author and cretor of the most significant discovery of our age; the theory of electromagnetism. Accurately acclaimed as the father of modern physics, he also made fundamental contributions to mathematics, astronomy and engineering.
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- "Who was James Clerk Maxwell?." hkm 16 Dec. 2006
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