In 1861, James Clerk Maxwell used photography to demonstrate the validity of the Young–Helmholtz color theory, and in doing so marked the beginning of color photography (see page 19). His process synthesized the colors of an object by the means of red, green, and blue light, using three black-and-white transparencies (A, B, and C—shown above) obtained from separation negatives and projected with colored filters. When these three colored images were superimposed, the colors of the tartan ribbon appeared (D). These images are a digital reconstruction of Maxwell’s experiment and were produced from D. A. Spencer’s 1938–39 glass copies that were made ...
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