Silver salts and standing waves: the history of interference colour photography

Gabriel Lippmann's interference colour photography is totally discussed today, but his ideas and technique were to prove essential for holography. The author describes first the aborted Newtonian attempts at explaining substantial colours through interference effects analogous to those actually at work in Lippmann's plates. Second, he shows how the standing-waves concept passed from acoustics to optics. Third, he follows across the 19th century what appears now a sideline in the development of colour photography: the discoveries of Seebeck, Herschel and Becquerel. While these are no longer of any practical importance, their little known story is more complex and perhaps more instructive than that of three-colour photography. As to the final 1891 Lippmann demonstration, it was both widely acclaimed and disputed at the time, in part for chauvinistic reasons.