* * * * * ISOCHROMATIC PHOTOGRAPHY. [Footnote: Read at the stated meeting of the Franklin Institute, March 18, 1885.] By FRED. E. IVES. It is well known that the ordinary photographic processes do not reproduce colors in the true proportion of their brightness. Violet and blue photograph too light; green, yellow, orange and red, too dark. For a long time it was believed to be impossible to remedy this defect; and even when it became known that bromide of silver could be made more sensitive to yellow and red by staining it with certain dyes, the subject received very little attention, because it was also known that the increase of sensitiveness was too slight to be of practical value in commercial photography. Dr. H.W. Vogel, who was one of the first, though not the first, to devote attention to this subject, announced, in 1873, that he had succeeded in making a yellow object photograph lighter than a blue or violet one, by using a silver-bromide plate stained with coraline, and exposed through a yellow glass. The plate showed no increased sensitiveness to red, and the experiment, although of considerable scientific interest, did not indicate a practically useful process. In the spring of 1878 I became interested in this subject, and tried to discover a method of producing plates which should be sensitive to all colors, and capable of reproducing them in the true proportion of their brightness. I commenced by trying nearly all the color sensitizers which had already been suggested, in order to learn which was the best, and then, if possible, _why_ it was the best, as a guide to further research. Chlorophyl was the only thing I tried which was sufficiently sensitive to red to offer any encouragement in that direction; but the solution which I obtained was weak and unstable, and far from being a satisfactory color sensitizer. Hoping to obtain a better solution with which to continue my experiments, I made extracts from many kinds of leaves, and found that a solution from blue myrtle leaves looked better and kept better than any other, and when it was applied to the silver-bromide plates they became remarkably sensitive, not only to all shades of red, but also to orange, yellow, and green. By placing in front of the lens a color-screen consisting of a small glass tank containing a weak solution of bichromate of potash, to cut off part of the blue and violet light, I obtained, with these chlorophyl plates, the first photographs in which all colors were reproduced in the true proportions of their brightness. But my chief desire at that time was to realize a method of producing from any object in colors a set of three negatives, in one of which the shadows should represent the blue of the original, in another the yellow, and in another the red, in such a manner that transparent pigment prints from these negatives--blue, yellow, and red--would, when superimposed on a white