The Professor Who Gave Colour Photography Away for Free
An Oregon experiment-station scientist stumbles on a way to fix true flower colours permanently in a photographic print — then walks into Seattle and refuses to patent it.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Prof. A. B. Leckenby, who has charge of the Oregon State Experiment Station at Union, and who has a wide acquaintance throughout the Northwest, was in Seattle a few days ago. He brought with him a number of photographs, which excited a great deal of interest among professional and amateur photographers of this city. It seems that quite by accident a few evenings ago he hit upon a method of reproducing the natural colors of objects in the photographs. He very successfully brought out the true colors of a number of varieties of flowers, fixing the colors permanently in the print. The discovery was unexpected, and so astonished and delighted was he that he continued working until 4 a.m. Leading photographers of Seattle, to whom the specimens of color photography were shown, were very skeptical as to the genuineness of the coloring, thinking that it was put on by hand, until close examination with magnifying glasses disclosed the fact that such a feat of hand painting would be impossible.
They thought that the professor was trying to interest them into buying some fake process — sell them a sort of gold brick — and were very wary of him, until he announced that he did not expect to patent his discovery, but on the contrary would shortly issue a bulletin, giving the information to the world, to be free to all alike. In this respect Mr. Leckenby places himself beyond the category of most of us, who would want a lead-pipe cinch on the rights to such an invention. He says the method of developing colors from negatives is so simple that anyone can do it, by following the instructions of his forthcoming bulletin. Altogether it looks as though Mr. Leckenby's discovery is the one that photographers have long been looking for.
“He announced that he did not expect to patent his discovery, but on the contrary would shortly issue a bulletin, giving the information to the world, to be free to all alike.”
Who first made a true colour photograph is still argued over by historians, and the free release of a good method is now an everyday expectation — open-source software, preprint servers, public-domain data. Leckenby's insistence that something this valuable should be given away rather than locked up reads less like 1902 than like a manifesto for the open-access movement.
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