How did cameras get color?

Answer 1

Experiments into colour Photography began in the 1840s, not long after photography itself was first developed, but was limited in the range of it's success. The quality and range of colour was severely limited to the three primary colours, as in the chemically complex Hillotype process invented by the American Daguerrotypist Levi Hill in 1850. Other experiments, such as those undertaken by Edmund Bequerrel and James Clerk Maxwell, achieved better results but still could find no way of preventing the colours from fading when exposed to light for prolonged periods of time. However, some colour photographs using this process dating from the 1870s onwards, have survived remarkably well.

It was the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann who finally perfected the technique of permanent colour photography in the 1890s, after commencing research into separating the colours of the solar spectrum via the 'interference method' in 1886. In 1891 he announced to the French Academy of Sciences that he had achieved a permanent method of successful colour photography, and the following year exhibited his first results, which included photos of a stained glass window, a group of flags, a bowl of Oranges topped by a poppy, and a multi-coloured parrot. His presentation of two papers on the subject led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908, but for several years before this, colour photography had been in use using the photographic plates that his research had helped to develop.