Frederic Eugene Ives was a U.S. inventor, born at Litchfield

Litchfield, Connecticut

Litchfield is a town in and former county seat of Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States, and is known as an affluent summer resort. The population was 8,316 at the 2000 census. The boroughs of Bantam and Litchfield are located within the town...

, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

. In 1874–78 he had charge of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...

, where in 1885 he was one of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. He was awarded The Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal

Elliott Cresson Medal

The Elliott Cresson Medal, also known as the Elliott Cresson Gold Medal, was the highest award given by the Franklin Institute. The award was established by Elliott Cresson, life member of the Franklin Institute, with $1,000 granted in 1848...

 in 1893, the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1903, and the John Scott Medal in 1887, 1890, 1904 and 1906. His son Herbert E. Ives

Herbert E. Ives

Herbert Eugene Ives was a scientist and engineer who headed the development of facsimile and television systems at AT&T in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also a critic of the special theory of relativity, and attempted to disprove the theory by means of logical arguments and...

 was a pioneer of television and telephotography, including color facsimile.

Color photography

Ives was a pioneer in the field of color photography

Color photography

Color photography is photography that uses media capable of representing colors, which are traditionally produced chemically during the photographic processing phase...

. He first demonstrated a system of natural color photography at the 1885 Novelties Exposition of the Franklin Institute

Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute is a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States, dating to 1824. The Institute also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.-History:On February 5, 1824, Samuel Vaughn Merrick and...

 in Philadelphia. His fully developed Kromskop (long-vowel marks over both "o"s and pronounced "chrome-scope") color photography system was commercially available in England by late 1897 and in the US about a year later. Three separate black-and-white photographs of the subject were taken through carefully adjusted red, green and blue filters, a method of photographically recording color first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This united all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics into a consistent theory...

 in 1855 and imperfectly demonstrated in 1861, but subsequently forgotten and independently reinvented by others. Transparent positives of the three images were then viewed in Ives' Kromskop, in which red, green and blue filters and transparent reflecting surfaces served to visually combine the three images into one full-color image. Both monocular and stereoscopic Kromskop viewers were made. Prepared sets of images, named Kromograms, were sold for viewing in them. Alternatively, a Kromskop projector could be used to exactly superimpose the three images, each illuminated by light of the appropriate color, on a projection screen. Special cameras and camera attachments were sold to prospective "Kromskopists" who wanted to create their own Kromograms. The quality of the color was highly praised but the system was not a commercial success. It was discontinued around 1907 when the Autochrome process, which was simple to use and required no special equipment, appeared on the market.

In 2009, several Kromogram color photographs of San Francisco taken by Ives shortly after the 1906 earthquake

1906 San Francisco earthquake

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco, California, and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a moment magnitude of 7.9; however, other...

 were discovered while cataloging a collection of Kromograms at the National Museum of American History

National Museum of American History

The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...

. These images are thought to be the only existing images of that disaster in natural color (i.e., with color recorded and reproduced photographically rather than added in by hand), as well as the earliest extant natural color photographs, in general, of San Francisco.

Stereoscopic photography

In 1903 Ives patented the parallax stereogram, the first "no glasses" autostereoscopic

Autostereoscopy

Autostereoscopy is any method of displaying stereoscopic images without the use of special headgear or glasses on the part of the viewer. Because headgear is not required, it is also called "glasses-free 3D" or "glassesless 3D"...

 3-D display technology. A compound image consisting of fine interlaced vertical slivers of a stereoscopic pair of images was seen in 3-D when viewed through a slightly separated fine grid of correctly spaced alternating opaque and transparent vertical lines, now known as a parallax barrier. The grid allowed each eye to see only the slivers of the image intended for it. Ives first exhibited such an image in 1901, at which time he stated that the basic concept had occurred to him about sixteen years earlier while working with line screens for the halftone process. In 1904 Auguste Berthier came forward to claim due credit for the first publication of this concept. He had included it near the end of an 1896 article about large-format stereoscopic images. Berthier had also created an extremely coarse and nonfunctional interlaced image for purposes of illustration, but he never reduced the idea to practice or attempted to patent it. Eventually, several other inventors, including Ives' son Herbert, substituted an array of narrow cylindrical lenses for the simple parallax barrier and incorporated more than two viewpoints, creating lenticular parallax panoramagram 3-D images of the type most familiar from 3-D postcards, trading cards and similar novelties, often confused with holograms

Holography

Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...

. The original parallax barrier method is currently (2011) employed in several no-glasses 3-D video displays, such as the Nintendo 3DS

Nintendo 3DS

The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic 3D effects without the use of 3D glasses or any additional accessories. The Nintendo 3DS features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software...

. Ives also patented the use of parallax barriers for displaying changeable images.

As early as 1900, Ives was tinkering with stereoscopic motion pictures

3-D film

A 3-D film or S3D film is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception...

. By 1922, he and fellow inventor Jacob Leventhal were producing a popular series of anaglyph

Anaglyph image

Anaglyph images are used to provide a stereoscopic 3D effect, when viewed with glasses where the two lenses are different colors, such as red and cyan. Images are made up of two color layers, superimposed, but offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect...

 3-D novelty shorts called Plastigrams. The first one was released by Educational Pictures

Educational Pictures

Educational Pictures was a film distribution company founded in 1919 by Earle Hammons . Educational primarily distributed short subjects, and today is probably best known for its series of 1930s comedies starring Buster Keaton, as well as for a series of one-reel comedies featuring Shirley...

 in December 1922, and the later ones by Pathé Films

Pathé

Pathé or Pathé Frères is the name of various French businesses founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France.-History:...

. On 22 September 1924, one of the Plastigram films, Luna-cy!, was re-released in the DeForest Phonofilm

Phonofilm

In 1919, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patent on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines. These parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back...

 sound-on-film process.

Halftone process

Halftone

Halftone

Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size, in shape or in spacing...

 processes allow photographs, complete with their "half-tone" intermediate shades of gray or color, to be reproduced in ink on paper by means of a printing press, like text. Prior to such processes, images were printed in books and periodicals by means of hand-engraved metal plates or wood blocks, or from drawings made on lithographic

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...

 stones. Half-tone effects were obtained by engraving closely spaced parallel or hatched lines, by stippling

Stippling

Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. Such a pattern may occur in nature and these effects are frequently emulated by artists.-Art:...

, or by exploiting the granular texture inherent in the stone lithography process.

Ives is sometimes referred to as "the" inventor of "the" halftone process, but this is incorrect and Ives never made such a claim for himself. There was not one halftone process, but a considerable number of them, the earliest dating nearly as far back as the introduction of practical photography in 1839. They varied widely in their degree of practicality and the quality of their results. The first attempts involved directly etching the unique images formed on metallic Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The image is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate....

 plates. Although pleasing results were obtained, etching the plates required great skill and care, the images could not be printed along with ordinary type, and the delicate plates wore out after a very small number of impressions, making such processes useless for publishing on a commercial scale. More practical processes started appearing in the 1860s, but high cost, special printing requirements or low image quality variously kept these early processes from coming into widespread use.

Ives turned his attention to halftone processes in the late 1870s. The objectives were to more or less automatically convert the intermediate tones of a photographic image into small lines or dots of stark black and white; to do this better, or at least more efficiently, than was possible with existing processes; and to create a printing block that could be combined with blocks of text in an ordinary printing press. The lines or dots, of varying widths or sizes respectively, had to be small enough to adequately blend together in the eye at a normal viewing distance, producing the illusion of various shades of gray, yet the printing plates had to be durable enough to last through a typical press run without excessive degradation. Above all, the process had to be economical enough to make its widespread commercial use practical.

Ives patented his first "Ives' process" in 1881. This early process required the creation of a photographic relief image, made by a variety of the carbon process

Carbon print

A carbon print is a photographic print with an image consisting of pigmented gelatin, rather than of silver or other metallic particles suspended in a uniform layer of gelatin, as in typical black-and-white prints, or of chromogenic dyes, as in typical photographic color prints.In the original...

, from which a plaster cast was made. The highest areas on the surface of the plaster corresponded with the darkest areas of the original photograph. The cast was pressed into contact with an inked rubber grid consisting of an array of tiny pyramidal elements, which caused a regular array of ink dots to be deposited on the plaster, their sizes varying according to the heights of the surface. The dot pattern was then photographed onto a metal plate coated with photoresist

Photoresist

A photoresist is a light-sensitive material used in several industrial processes, such as photolithography and photoengraving to form a patterned coating on a surface.-Tone:Photoresists are classified into two groups: positive resists and negative resists....

, which was developed and chemically etched, a process known as photoengraving

Photoengraving

Photoengraving also known as photo-chemical milling is a process of engraving using photographic processing techniques. The full form of photoengraving is photo mechanical process in the graphic arts, used principally for reproducing illustrations. The subject is photographed, and the image is...

and already in use for making printing plates from line drawings, handwriting and other purely black and white subject matter. Although complex, this process was simpler and more efficient than other processes then in some limited use, and in 1884 Ives asserted that it was "the first patented or published process which was introduced into truly successful commercial operation."

A few years later, Ives replaced this process with the much simpler one usually associated with his name. In the new process, an ordinary photograph was rephotographed directly onto the sensitized metal plate. A crossline screen, consisting of two glass plates finely ruled with opaque lines and sandwiched together with their lines crossing at right angles, was positioned near the surface of the metal, and a specially shaped diaphragm was used with the camera lens. Combined with the inherently stark black-and-white nature of the photoengraving process, these devices served to break up the image into a regular pattern of dots of various sizes with optimized shapes. During the 1890s, photographs reproduced by this second "Ives process" largely replaced the use of hand-engraved wood block and steel plate illustrations, and it remained the standard process for photographically illustrating books, magazines and newspapers during the next eighty years. Although much more technologically sophisticated methods eventually came into use for creating the printing plates, the structure of most printed halftone images has remained virtually unchanged.

External links

• Ives papers at the Smithsonian