Colour photographs from 1900 found by TU Delft

Wednesday 6 November 2024, 21:12 by Elja Trum | 2,124 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

TU Delft has found six glass slides (1890 to 1910) that turn out to be a very early attempt at colour photography.

The glass slides were found during an inventory by the Programme for Tailored Faculty Collections at the Imaging Physics department of the faculty of Applied Sciences.

To view the images, Thim Zuidwijk, a technician in the department, recreated a diffraction chromoscope.

This chromoscope revealed striking images of, among other things, a vase with a floral pattern and a still life of a fruit bowl next to a banana and a wrapped citrus fruit.

Vase and fruit bowl

The six glass slides, which are more than a hundred years old, had been carefully stored in a cardboard box. If you hold the transparent plates up to the light, the outlines of an image appear in the same rainbow colours as those of a soap bubble.

The glass slides are predecessors of colour photographs from the early 20th century, which could only be viewed with a special device, the so-called diffraction chromoscope.

The slides show, among other things, a butterfly, a painting, a vase with a floral pattern and a still life of a fruit bowl next to a banana and a wrapped citrus fruit.

Colour photograph

To view the transparent plates, technician Thim Zuidwijk recreated a diffraction chromoscope from the early 20th century.

'If you place the transparent slides under a microscope, you can see that they contain rows of tiny lines. You can compare them to battlements,' Zuidwijk explains.

'The distance between the lines varies, and each distance bends red, green or blue light in the same direction. The diffraction chromoscope captures the green, red and blue light rays from the glass slide and brings them together to form a colour photograph.'

The start of colour photography

At the beginning of 1900, The Scientific Shop in the United States sold the diffraction chromoscope and accompanying slides as a device for viewing colour photographs.

Around the same time, the Lumière brothers brought the Autochrome to market, a technique that proved so successful that it is now known as the beginning of colour photography.

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