The first commercially successful color photography process. The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented it in 1903 and put it on sale in 1907. A glass plate was covered with tiny grains of potato starch dyed red-orange, green and violet-blue, and then with a black-and-white silver emulsion. After processing, the plate became a unique color positive on glass, a kind of transparency.
An autochrome is viewed by holding it up to the light or by projecting it onto a screen. The process was popular until the 1930s, when color films such as Kodachrome (1935) and Agfacolor (1936) replaced it. The Lumière brothers are also famous as pioneers of cinema.
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