Many of the biggest achievements in photography’s history came from photographers and chemists, but the invention of color photographs wasn’t initiated by a photographer at all but a physicist obsessed with the science of colors.
James Clerk Maxwell was a mid-1800s physicist credited for early work in electromagnetism, but one of Maxwell’s key interests was color. Maxwell's research focused on unearthing how people see colors and different color combinations, but his work led to a theory on how photographers could create color images by mixing light.
