world in color

Whenever I picture events from the 19th and early 20th centuries, I always see in black and white. In my mind, it's as if color didn't magically appear until the 1930s or 1940s. I attribute the discontinuity to the fact that any old photos or movies you see are inevitably in black and white and shades of gray. When that's all I've seen from that time period, it's hard to picture things in color.

I came across this site today, displaying a collection of color photographs from World War I. At first I was skeptical, thinking that the photos may have simply be colorized. But after a little research, I think they may be genuine. Color photography first became practical in 1907 when the Lumiere brothers invented the Autochrome process. Considering that the process was invented by a Frenchman and the WWI photos appear to be taken in the trenches in France, I'm going to accept them as genuine, or at the very least, representative.

The Lumiere brothers also invented the Cinematograph, the first film camera that both recorded and allowed moving pictures to be shown on a screen to an audience. Pretty cool guys, eh?