First colour photo in a newspaper – May 23, 1937 in NYC Sunday Mirror. Taken by George Sheedy on 35mm Kodachrome
Toronto. Today, with modern digital cameras and smartphones, we take colour for granted and convert the results to B&W only for a ‘special effect’. It wasn’t always the case. For many decades various colour processes were tried. Some had good or modest sales; others fizzled and disappeared. The earliest still camera colour processes (like autochrome) were on glass plates.
Two American musicians spent many years perfecting a tri-pack process (layers of material on a single base with three layers each sensitive to one different narrow colour band, plus other layers. Colour couplers were imbedded in each of the three sensitive layers; couplers that had to be factory developed to avoid migration to other layers.
The final stages of research were done at Kodak and a brand name – Kodachrome – previously used for a two colour process, was used for this creative new and complex three colour tri-pack. According to Douglas Collins in his massive coffee-table size book “The Story of Kodak (1990)” this Kodachrome was announced April, 15 1935 and initially sold in 16mm format for home movies but quickly expanded to 35mm still film, movie film and larger cut film sizes for professional use doing illustrations like magazine covers. The image shown here is from Collins’s book on page 213.
My first use of Kodachrome was in the 35mm format. It was a measly ASA (ISO) 10 at the time. I remember photographing peacocks at Springwater Park and getting the odd colourful tail feathers amongst inky black shadows while shooting in bright sunlight!
Sadly, like all films, Kodachrome fell victim to the digital era and even its processing in North America died on December 30, 2010, some 75 years after it was first marketed. Another round of “thank you” to my friend and fellow PHSC member, George Dunbar, for sharing these pages (1, 2 and 3) from the May 1935 issue of the International Photographer on the birth of Kodachrome. Note that this post name was also used for movie title(s) too.
