|
Levi Hill (26 February 1816 − 9 February 1865)〔(Levi L. Hill )〕 was an American minister in upstate New York who claimed in 1851 that he had invented a color photographic process. Borrowing terms previously introduced in France, Hill called his process "heliochromy" and the photographs that it produced "heliochromes", but by analogy to the naming of the then-current daguerreotype process after its inventor Louis Daguerre, Hill's color photographs were soon being called "Hillotypes". Hill's work was met with skepticism during his lifetime, then for more than a hundred years after his death histories of photography routinely dismissed it as a complete fraud. Later researchers found that his very difficult process did in fact have a limited ability to reproduce the colors of nature. ==Life and work== Levi Hill was, among other things, a Baptist minister in Westkill (Greene County) in the New York Catskill Mountains area. In the early 1840s, Hill learned the daguerreotype process, the only photographic process commonly used during that decade. It yielded black-and-white photographs that reproduced light and shade but not color. By 1851, Hill had worked out his own very different version of the process, which he claimed was able to reproduce the colors of the subject, too. Though many were of the opinion that the color in Hill's photographs was added by hand-tinting, he received support from some in the scientific community, most notably Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph. The claims made for Hill and his commercially unavailable secret process drew both skepticism and wrath from some professional photographers, who believed that clients were putting off having their pictures taken until they could be Hillotyped in color. In 1856, Hill wrote ''A Treatise on Heliochromy'', a book that promised to reveal his secrets at last. It was available only by advance subscription for $25 a copy,〔Backer, Wm. B. (1980). "(Are These The World’s First Color Photographs? )" ''American Heritage'', 31:4 (June-July 1980). Retrieved 10 July 2014.〕 an exorbitant price at that time (in contemporary US gold coins, well over an ounce of pure gold). After purchasers waded through a rambling autobiography, a history of photography and a cookbook for many other processes, they found a recipe for making Hillotypes that was so chemically complicated it was practically unworkable and useless. Hill died in 1865 at the age of 48, possibly a victim of his long and incautious exposure to the many extremely poisonous and corrosive chemicals involved in his experiments. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Levi Hill」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|