March 18, 2004
Found this link to the Library of Congress on a Web board I read. Basically, a photographer in pre-WWI Russia designed and built his own camera to take color pictures. His exposure glass was divided into three parts, each exposed in rapid succession (manually, I assume, since no drawing of the camera has ever been found) through red, green and blue filters. When the negatives were found, they were scanned into a computer, properly aligned, run back through the filters, then corrected for over- and under-exposure. The result is a batch of color pictures from the early 1910s, and I'm pretty sure they're the only color photos made in that time period.
If I understand correctly, the color photography process that was developed later in the century is based on the same idea, but more modern. But this guy was well ahead of his time.
