Abstract
EVERY one interested in photography—and in these days who is not?—must deeply regret that so eminent a worker as Dr. Vogel has passed away. He was one of the pioneers in the band of investigators in what may, perhaps, be called the second period of the development of photography, dating from the time of the daguerreotype to the introduction of gelatine dry plates. When Fox Talbot and Daguerre made known their wonderful methods of making nature draw her own pictures, he was a lad of six or seven years of age, and it was thirty-four years after this that Dr. Vogel announced his discovery that, by the use of certain colouring matters, it was possible to make a photographic plate sensitive to other colours than those to which it had previously been considered as sensitive. This discovery was of so radical a nature that a considerable number of eminent experimentalists were quoted as having failed to corroborate the observation, and the general idea at the time seemed to be that Vogel's announcement was due to an error in his work. At the present day there is no need to enlarge upon the importance of colour sensitisers, for, practically speaking, the whole art of the correct monochromatic rendering of colours by photography, and of the various indirect methods of producing pictures in natural colours by photographic means, are founded upon their use. The fact that it is rather an increase of sensitiveness than the actual conferment of sensitiveness that is effected, and that Dr. Vogel's theory of the action has not commended itself to other workers in the same field, are only matters of detail that in no way affect the facts established by him.
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Dr. H. W. Vogel. Nature 59, 204–205 (1898). https://doi.org/10.1038/059204a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/059204a0