History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Today with the use of digital cameras and mobile phones, we take colour photography for granted. This is the story of how nearly a century ago, a pioneering invention, and a production plant in Willesden transformed photography.   The invention In 1928 at a meeting of the Professional Photographers Association, LW Oliver and WTL Becker demonstrated their new technique of making colour photographs. They said it had taken two years of research with more than 5,000 experiments. Although there was the French autochrome method which produced colour photos, it was not widely available. For over 30 years photographers had been trying without success to find a practical and simple way of reproducing colours. Oliver and Becker used a modified camera to simultaneously produce a negative using three thin films sensitive to red, blue and green. The films were superimposed and printed on white paper to produce a colour image. Importantly, multiple prints could be made of the image. It received ...