01-17-2023-1454 - Nobel Prize Physics 1908 (silver plate imaging ; silver plate coated with a thin layer of silver chloride coloured up under the action of light with a colour corresponding to that of the light used. ; photography ; Edmond Becquerel )

Nobel Prize

Physics

1908

'Award ceremony speech

Presentation Speech by Professor K.B. Hasselberg, President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on December 10, 1908

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The Royal Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1908 to Professor Gabriel Lippmann of the Sorbonne for his method, based on the phenomenon of interference, which permits the reproduction of colours by photography.

Even before 1849, when the art of photographic reproduction was discovered by the pioneers of Science, Niepce, Daguerre, Talbot and others, the question of means of rendering and of fixing colours on the photographic plate has loomed large. It looked as though the answer was at hand when Edmond Becquerel showed that a silver plate coated with a thin layer of silver chloride coloured up under the action of light with a colour corresponding to that of the light used. This observation led no further. Becquerel had no explanation for the origin of the colours nor did he find a means of fixing them on the plate. They passed off rapidly and so his method, being thus of no practical use, failed to win the attention it undoubtedly deserved.'

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1908/ceremony-speech/