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Frederic Eugene Ives was an American inventor and scientist who made significant contributions to the field of colorimetry.
He was born on February 17, 1856, in Litchfield, CT to Hubert L. Ives and his wife Ellen. His father passed away when Frederic was still a child. He left school when he was 12 and began an apprenticeship as a printer at the Litchfield Enquirer. Photography and engraving became his hobby. At age 18, based on his reputation and without having a formal education, he was invited to run the photography laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca NY where he stayed for four years, a key period in regard to his inventions. While at Cornell, he invented the halftone printing process for black-and-white photographs. In 1879, he got married and moved to Philadelphia where he established an association with a major manufacturer of woodcut engravings who was interested in photographic reproduction methods and Ives’ halftone process. Until 1880 illustrations in books, magazines, and newspapers were largely based on woodcuts as well as lithography; by the turn of the century, the industry in the United States had mostly switched over to Ives’ half-tone process.
Ives neglected to have the halftone process patented. However, for other inventions he was issued a total of 70 patents in his lifetime, many related to trichromatic halftone printing. He revolutionized color printing in books, magazines, and newspapers in a manner similar to that for black-and-white printing. Up to that time, the process in commercial use of color printing was lithography, with the image constructed from up to a dozen hand-made limestone or metal engravings used to print with differently colored inks. He regularly lectured on the subject of his inventions at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. Circa 1890, he moved to New Jersey, outside New York. His son Herbert obtained a PhD degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1908. He was also active in the field of color science, publishing in 1915 an important article on the transformation of color-matching functions between different colorimetric systems [1].
52.1 Trichromatic Camera and Printing
Stereoscopic color image as viewed in the Kromskop, 1897. On the left are the B&W stereoscopic images for the three primary colors as used in the Kromskop. Top right is a digital recreation of the two stereoscopic versions of the image. On bottom right is an enlarged version of the image based on a photographic print made in the 1950s
The early trichromatic principle of color photography had been enunciated and demonstrated by J. C. Maxwell in 1855 with an image taken separately through red, green, and violet colored filters and developed as black-and-white positives on glass plates [2]. Light was projected in overlapping fashion through the three images and their related color filters onto a screen to generate the multi-colored image. The result was less than perfect and the process was soon forgotten but investigated again later by others, including Ives. He spent much time and effort to develop viable technologies for the method, including the “panchromatic” emulsions required to produce good quality color reproductions of scenes [3]. There were two steps to Ives’ halftone color printing process: (1) Color separations were obtained by making successive exposures through colored filters onto film and halftone plates were made from these filtered exposures. (2) The three separations were printed onto paper, on top of each other in exact registration, with yellow, magenta and blue–green inks [4]. This process and further developments resulted in a revolution of the technical methods of printing colored images.
US postage stamp celebrating Ives’ invention of the halftone printing process, 1996