Levi Hill (26 February 1816 − 9 February 1865) 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 "

heliochrome A heliochrome is a color photograph, particularly one made by the early experimental processes of the middle 19th to early 20th centuries. The word was coined from the Greek roots "helios", the sun, and "chroma", color, to mean "colored by the su ...

s", but by analogy to the naming of the then-current daguerreotype process after its inventor

Louis Daguerre Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre ( , ; 18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851) was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photog ...

, 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 Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...

process commonly used during that decade. It yielded

black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...

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 Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...

, inventor of the

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

. 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 1851, photographer Daniel DeWitt Tompkins Davie, then-president of the Association of Daguerreotypists, assembled an investigating team that pronounced Hill's invention "a delusion." 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). Davie obtained a court order banning the sale of Hill's book on the grounds that it libeled him and his committee, with the result that most of the edition was pulped. The few surviving copies show that the book consists of a rambling autobiography, a history of photography, a cookbook for many other processes, and finally a recipe for making Hillotypes that is so chemically complicated it is practically unworkable. 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.

Subsequent research

In 1981, photography professor and historian Joseph Boudreau compounded the archaic chemistry and replicated the techniques described by Hill in ''A Treatise on Heliochromy''. Boudreau was able to create Hillotypes that distinctly and verifiably showed muted reproductions of many of the colors in the test subjects photographed, including red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and orange; these colors were all produced by the action of light alone, without the application of dyes or pigments. In 2007, A chemical analysis of Hill's plates by researchers affiliated with the National Museum of American History, found that pigments had indeed been used to enhance the colors in some Hillotypes, but that this accounted for only some of the photographs' color. They found that reds and blues had for the most part been genuinely (if crudely) reproduced photographically, but that other colors had been fraudulently added. Getty Conservation Institute senior scientist Dusan Stulik, who performed the analysis with colleague Art Kaplan, concluded that “ ter pressure mounted to produce additional colors ... Hill began adding additional pigments to his color plates by hand, doctoring them to look more multi-hued than the originals."

External links

''A Treatise on Heliochromy'' at the Internet Archive

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hill, Levi 19th-century American inventors Pioneers of photography 1816 births 1865 deaths 19th-century American scientists