In 1839 L.K.M. Daguerre in France and W.H. Fox in England publicised the first practical techniques for creating permanent images by the agency of light. The important factor in their work was that they had each discovered and published a way of developing a latent image so that it became visible on paper or on a plate. The problem that had faced artists and scientists using the camera obscura during the early years of the nineteenth century had been how to fix the image that they had obtained by the action of light, without having to trace it onto translucent paper. Clearly, a light-sensitive chemical was required which was capable of being developed and fixed. A major advance in the progress of colour photography occurred when, in 1873, H.W. Vogel found that the addition of small quantities of certain dyestuffs to photographic emulsions made the plates sensitive to a wider range of colours. Vogel's outstanding discover opened the way forward and culminated in 1906 in the manufacture of the first panchromatic emulsions, sensitive to almost the whole of the visible spectrum.

Inspec keywords: image processing; cinematography; television; history

Other keywords: panchromatic emulsion; colour photography; photographic emulsion; colour television; dyestuffs; colour cinematography

Subjects: Radio and television broadcasting