Year awarded: 1896
Year Discovered: 1893
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann
Seeing as this website is so monochrome,(what’s that all about anyway?) it’s kind of ironic that this piece deals with the advent of colour photography. Professor Lippmann made numerous valuable fundamental contributions to many different branches of physics; especially in electricity, thermodynamics, optics, and of course photochemistry which in turn led to colour photographs. Colour photography had been attempted by others as early as the 1840’s but Lippmann’s method was really the first successful one. Successful, yet not viable. His method was finicky, cumbersome, and not at all easy to use, but it served to pave the way for future development (pun intended) in the field.
Lippmann had an undistinguished early academic career, but eventually grew into his own in the field of mathematical physics which he practiced at the Sorbonne in Paris until his death. His own academic advisor was Gustav Kirchhoff who had numerous other gifted pupils, such as Planck and Mendeleev, so Gabriel was in good company. Lippmann had students as well, and his most notable protégé was Marie Curie, also a noble laureate in her time.
Born landlocked in Luxembourg, it’s also ironic that of all places to die, Lippmann did so on an ocean liner in the Atlantic Ocean.