Hand-Book to the Photochromoscope (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Hand-Book to the Photochromoscope
Chapters ...)
Excerpt from Hand-Book to the Photochromoscope
Chapters 1, 2, 3, Of Part II, are taken from The Theory of Color by Professor Von Bezold, American Edition, Boston, 1876: Chapters 4, 5, 6, from Modern Chromatics by Professor Ogden Rood, of New York in the International Scientific Series, London.
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Frederic Eugene Ives was an American inventor, a pioneer in the field of color photography. He first demonstrated a system of natural color photography, fully developed Kromskop color photography system.
Background
Ives Frederic Eugene was born on February 17, 1856 on a farm near Litchfield, Connecticut, United States, the eldest of five children of Hubert Leverit and Ellen Amelia (Beach) Ives. On both sides he was descended from early English settlers in Massachusetts.
Frederic was a shy and sensitive child, early displaying perceptiveness and a capacity for hard work. When he was ten years old the family left the farm, and his father became a storekeeper in Norfolk, Connecticut.
A new world opened up for the boy when he acquired a "dollar microscope" and a book on natural philosophy.
Education
Less than two years later his father died, Frederic had to give up school and go to work. After clerking briefly in a store, he decided that he wanted to learn printing and began a three-year apprenticeship in the office of the Litchfield Enquirer. During this time the enterprising youth experimented in photography with a camera made from a cigar box and a spectacle lens. He also taught himself wood engraving. This experience, combined with his knowledge of printing and photography, prompted his later invention of photoengraving processes.
Career
Completing his apprenticeship in 1873, Ives joined a printing establishment in Ithaca, New York. He soon decided that his future lay in photography rather than in printing, and after learning the photographic trade from a cousin, he opened his own studio in Ithaca.
Soon after, at the age of nineteen, he was placed in charge of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University. This was a fortunate connection, for it gave him access to the university's library resources and lectures. Many experiments were being made during those years to find photographic means of producing engraved printing plates. Working independently, Ives developed a "swelled gelatine" and stereotype process of photoengraving for reproducing line drawings which was used with excellent results in the college newspaper. By 1878 he was absorbed in the problem of reproducing photographs and shaded drawings. One night that summer, according to his own account, he went to bed exhausted and awoke in the morning to see, as if projected on the ceiling, a complete solution of the problem. Making a gelatine relief from a photographic negative, he then by mechanical means translated this relief into dots of varying size from which a printing plate could be made.
Lacking funds to develop his invention, Ives moved to Philadelphia early in 1879 and formed an association with the firm of Crosscup and West, producers of wood-engraved printing plates, under which, in return for a regular wage, he set up a photoengraving department and turned out "halftone" plates according to his new process, at the same time carrying on further experiments. The first commercially used "Ives Process" halftone appeared in the June 1881 issue of the Philadelphia Photographer. Still not content, Ives sought a wholly photographic method of translating a photograph into the requisite pattern of dots.
In 1885 Ives conceived the idea of sealing two screens face to face, and in the following winter he perfected the crossline-screen halftone process which, with technical improvements in the screens themselves introduced in the 1890's by Louis and Max Levy , has since come into general use.
Meanwhile Ives had been experimenting with three-color printing and color photography. In 1885, at the Novelties Exhibition in Philadelphia, he exhibited a "photo-mechanical reproduction of a highly colored chromo-lithograph" made by the use of three halftone plates. Color photography now became his focal interest, and by 1890 he had developed the photo-chromoscope, or Kromskop, a three-negative system of color photography which projected colored views of remarkable fidelity. A later stereoscopic version was even more striking. Ives subsequently developed the "Tripak" color camera (1912) and contributed to the development of color film for motion pictures.
In the 1880's he made suggestions for systems of phototelegraphy and heat photography, anticipating developments in these fields by many years.
He died at the age of eighty-one at his home in Philadelphia.
Achievements
Frederic Eugene Ives was known as the inventor of the parallax stereogram, the first "no glasses" autostereoscopic 3-D display technology. His other important inventions include the modern short-tube binocular microscope (1903), a colorimeter and tint photometer (1908 - 09), and diffraction grating replicas and other optical devices. He was one of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia.
He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1893, the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1903, and the John Scott Medal in 1887, 1890, 1904 and 1906.
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Views
Quotations:
Ives wrote in his autobiography: "Some men are as naturally inventors as others are poets, fiction writers, statesmen or merchants, and the typical amateur inventor will pursue his course through any amount of poverty and hardship and indifference, thinking much more about his work than about any material reward which it may bring. "
Personality
Frederic had common sense, combined with his remarkable grasp of scientific principles. He invented for practical purposes, but he was no business man.
Connections
In 1879 Ives married Mary Elizabeth Olmstead, who died in 1904. They had two sons, Edwin Olmstead and Herbert Eugene, the latter a distinguished physicist and engineer who made important contributions to the development of television and the transmission of pictures by wire.
In 1913 Ives married Mrs. Margaret Campbell Cutting, who predeceased him.
