Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron

Ducos Du Hauron, Louis (1837-1920), French inventor and photographer, born into a middle-class family and privately educated. In 1859 he laid out principles for colour photography, and in 1868-9 produced a series of papers foreshadowing almost every colour process since exploited. He sensitized collodion plates to green and red, designed a combined colour camera/projector, and made the first colour prints. His single commercial venture collapsed in a factory fire, and his subsequent life, dogged by ill luck, was eked out only by a meagre government pension and help from friends. The colour technologist D. A. Spencer wrote of him: ‘Rarely has any inventor shown such imaginative foresight, or received so little encouragement.’

— Graham Saxby

Bibliography

• Coote, J. H., The Illustrated History of Colour Photography (1993)

Louis Ducos du Hauron

Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron (8 December 1837–31 August 1920) was a French pioneer of color photography. He was born in Langon, Gironde and died in Agen.

In the years following his unpublished paper of 1862 he set out practical ways of recording color images using both additive (red, green, blue) and subtractive (cyan, magenta, yellow) methods. In 1868 he patented some of his methods and in 1869 he wrote Les Couleurs en Photographie. One of his earliest color photographs is the Landscape of Southern France, taken by the subtractive method in 1877.

A view of Agen with St.Caprais cathedral, France in 1877 by Louis Ducos du Hauron, a French pioneer of color photography. Heliochrome (bichromate process) Original size 16,5x22,6 cm. Image area: 14x20 cm; Mount: 19,6x25,7 cm. George Eastman House. 1981:0285:0001

References

• Coe, Brian Colour Photography. The first hundred years 1840-1940, (1978) Ash & Grant, ISBN 0-904069-24-9
• "Lumière Jubilee.". Time (magazine). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755327,00.html. Retrieved 2008-04-29. "The idea was patented as early as 1864 by a now forgotten Frenchman named Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron." 

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