A 160-Year-Old Photographic Mystery


Daguerreotype Levi Hill
In a letter to the Daguerreian Journal in 1851, Levi Hill claimed to have invented color photography. National Museum of American History, SI

“There, do you see it?” she asks, holding up a small, silvery rectangle in the half-lit room.

For a moment, I do: a splash of blue on a bird’s wings. Then it disappears.


Lifting another plate from a storage box labeled “Hill, Levi,” Michelle Delaney sighs as she examines it.

“Oh, that makes me sad. You used to be able to make out the outline of the village in the center here, but it’s faded even more now,” she says. I see only a blur of brown, gray and white; what a ghost might look like caught on camera.

In a sense, that’s what Delaney, 44, curator of the National Museum of American History’s photographic history collection, has been chasing the past three years: the ghost of the Rev. Levi L. Hill. In the years since his death in 1865, a few historians praised Hill as the unacknowledged inventor of color photography. (A Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell, is generally credited with producing the first successful color photograph, in 1861.) Most, however, concluded that Hill was a hoodwinker.

Hill was a Baptist minister in West Kill, a tiny town in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains, when he began experimenting with daguerreo­types, an early form of photography. In February 1851, Hill made an astonishing claim: “I now have forty-five specimens, all of which present the several colors, true to a tint, and with a degree of brilliancy never seen in the richest Daguerreotype,” he boasted in a letter to the Daguerreian Journal, the first commercially produced photography magazine. He vowed to continue experimenting until he “perfected the discovery” and assured fellow photographers that, after patenting the process, he would share it with all of them for a “reasonable” price.

The journal’s editor, S. D. Humphery, lavished Hill with praise, christening his invention a “Hillotype.” But the fervor soon soured. Hill had promised a public demonstration of his works and process, but he kept pushing the date back.

Hill had tried—and failed—to patent his method. An 1853 government document stated that “existing patent laws would not afford to the inventor the security required” for his chemical process. Hill turned his back on photography altogether in 1855 after his wife and research partner, Emmeline, died at age 38.

He did finally publish his ideas in an 1856 volume titled A Treatise on Heliochromy, but by then, says Delaney, most of his peers “had thoroughly dismissed Hill’s work as fakery.”







At the very least, he was a colorful character.

Michelle Delaney holds a portrait of 19th-century photography pioneer Levi Hill. Stephen Voss
Lacking a patent, Hill declined to explain his color process. National Museum of American History, SI
By the time Hill explained his color process, most of his peers had concluded he was a charlatan. National Museum of American History, SI