Color photo in 1909

In 1909, color film did not exist, yet a brilliant man named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in Russia had found a way to shoot and view color images.

The technique was ingenious. He photographed the same scene three times in rapid succession, placing a filter of a different primary color in front of the lens: red, green, and blue (RGB: the same system used in today's monitors). In this way, he obtained three images in which red, green, and blue were respectively missing, having been absorbed by the filter. Obviously, these were black and white negative plates, but they were characterized by the absence of that color's contribution. That is, in the first one, instead of red, it was white, and the same was true for the others for green and blue.
At this point, he projected the plates onto a white wall, superimposing them with three projectors in front of which he applied the same filters: red, green, and blue, thus recreating the color image.

In this way, he obtained splendid images, like the one on the side (click it), which today have been digitally recreated from his plates and are preserved at the Library of Congress and visible on the internet.

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