In 1851, the art of photography was barely a decade old, and American daguerreotypists reading The Photographic Art-Journal could still expect some kind of innovation every month. But the January 1851 issue had a shocker: “We learn with pleasure that Mr L. Hill has succeeded in impressing the image upon the daguerreotype plate in all the beauty and brilliance of the natural colors.”
Natural colours in photographs had been ardently hoped for ever since the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. In their absence, customers demanded hand-tinting, a practice that made photographers cringe. A few inventors managed unnatural blotches of colour on exposures – a red here, a blue there – but they bore little relation to the colour of the original. Natural colours were unattainable until Hill began to produce Hillotypes-like this one of an old colour engraving.
THE Reverend Levi Hill’s remarkable career had an unusual start. Born in New York in 1816, he had pledged himself to the ministry after falling through the ice on the Hudson River and miraculously re-emerging through an air hole. But years of sermonising in draughty churches wrecked his health with chronic bronchitis, from which he found relief only after inadvertently breathing in a lungful of bromine fumes in a daguerreotyping lab.
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Hill went on to write one of the first books on daguerreotyping, and had been secretly working on colour photography for two years when an indiscreet friend blurted out word of his success to the editor of The Photographic-Art Journal. Hill remained a nervous and sickly man, unready for fame, but he confirmed the rumour to the Journal: “The discovery will completely supersede daguerreotyping… Among my forty-five specimens, I have the following: A VIEW, containing a red house, green grass and foliage, the wood- color of the trees, several different shades of red and brindle, colored garments on a clothes line, blue sky, and the faint blue of the atmosphere.”
Eight thousand letters flooded into Hill’s cottage in the mountains at Westkill, New York state, offering tens of thousands of dollars if only he would part with the secret of heliochromy, as he called it. But with a child and a tubercular wife to support, Hill insisted that “not a scrap or item shall ever be communicated until I am made perfectly sure of suitable compensation”. A lucky few viewed the heliochromes, now universally known as “Hillotypes”. They marvelled at an enamelled finish that deepened with buffing, distinguishing Hillotypes from easily damaged daguerreotypes.
The editor of the Daguerreian Journal was so impressed that he appointed Hill as his co-editor, gushing to readers: “The HILLOTYPE surpasses in magnificence any discovery appertaining to our art… Could Raphael have looked upon a Hillotype just before completing his Transfiguration, the pallet and brush would have fallen from his hand, and the picture would have remained unfinished.”
Not everyone was thrilled. Daguerreotypists with a clunky monochrome process now faced the prospect of obsolescence overnight. Why pay for an old-fashioned daguerreotype when Hillotypes were about to become available? The Photographic Art-Journal tried to flatter Hill into revealing his secret. When that failed it lashed out with intimations that the Hillotype was a “swindle” or “simply a scheme for selling a large number of Mr Hill’s books”.
Inventors and photographers rose to Hill’s defence. His supporters included telegraph innovator Samuel Morse, who knew Daguerre himself, and had been one of the first Americans to see a daguerreotype. “I have no doubt whatsoever of the reality of his discovery,” he admonished The Photographic Art-Journal. “There are good reasons why he should at present withhold both his process and his results from the public.”
Hill was trying to make Hillotyping simpler and more reliable before marketing it. But as 1851 dragged on without further announcements, the calls for Hill to reveal all grew louder. “[He is] injuring the daguerreotype business,” snapped The Photographic Art-Journal. “He is under moral obligation to the community of Daguerreians to place before them a successful termination of his experiments.” Hill found himself no longer working at the Daguerreian Journal, whose editor now sniffed at the “scummy” quality of Hill’s photos.
Affairs came to a head in October 1851 when a self-appointed three-man committee from the New York Daguerreian Association travelled to Westkill to confront Hill. He received them politely but refused to show them his work. One member, D. D. T. Davie, became so enraged that he threatened Hill with violence. The ailing Hill, in fear of his life from marauding daguerreotypists, bought a revolver, borrowed a guard dog, and set up a village watch on his house. Meanwhile, the committee issued a report denouncing Hillotypes as “an unmitigated delusion”.
Hill needed help: he demonstrated his invention to the US Senate’s patent committee to show its importance, and they came away convinced. Yet he still refused to release or patent it. “This invention is my own in every sense,” he stubbornly asserted in an open letter to the New York Daily Times. Abuse poured in, and even Samuel Morse was denounced as Hill’s “stooge”. Morse was unrepentant: “Who has the right to demand him to reveal it to the public now? Who, indeed, has a right to demand it at any time?”
Hill and his wife were now so ill that scarcely anything could be demanded of them. Mrs Hill eventually died in 1855. Her husband, barely recovered from his loss, finally published A Treatise on Heliochromy the following year. The slim volume sold for a steep $25 a copy and was panned by the photography journals. One dismissed Hill’s technique as “Barnumism”; another labelled him “The Prince of Humbugs”. But daguerreotypists were keen to read it. Unfortunately there were no copies to be found. Why?
D. D. T. Davie had struck again. Tipped off that Hill’s book contained a preface denouncing their 1851 confrontation, Davie waited until A Treatise was rolling off the presses and then slapped a writ for libel on the beleaguered Hill. The books were seized and pulped into rags. Davie, crowing in a letter to Hill’s former magazine, felt he’d done the world a great favour: “The extent of his hypocrisy and treachery with intent to defraud, is without a parallel in the world… I believe a halter for his neck will be the unanimous vote.” Davie didn’t get his wish: Hill lived for another decade, his Hillotypes discounted as a colourful fraud.
But were they? The first hints that Hill had achieved what he claimed emerged in 1972, when historian William Becker reissued a surviving copy of Hill’s treatise, piquing interest in the whole episode. A wooden box containing 62 faded photographic plates was rediscovered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where they had languished since Hill’s son-in-law had donated them in 1933. Were they merely painted daguerreotypes, as some detractors had claimed? Hill did colour in daguerreotypes for customers, so some of his surviving work probably is hand-tinted. And like daguerreotypes, the Hillotype was a positive photographic image on a silver-coated copper plate. But otherwise, Hill claimed, it was an entirely different process – and indeed the plates in the Smithsonian do not resemble normal daguerreotypes.
Mike Crawford of London’s Lighthouse Darkroom has studied them first hand. “They definitely appear to contain the colour within the emulsion or surface of the plate and not, as first suspected, as a painted addition,” he says. The real proof lies in Hill’s recipe, a lethal concoction of everything from honey and cinnamon oil to sulphuric acid and cyanide, with a key step involving the formation of green needle-like crystals composed in part of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids.
Hill treated his plates with mercury nitrate, gold sodium thiosulfate, and chlorine, then developed the exposures over heated mercury in a complicated process that might easily have killed would-be Hillotypists before they completed it. But Joseph Boudreau, head of photography at the Paier College of Art in Connecticut, persevered with Hill’s reprinted treatise in hand. In 1986 he announced his finding: Hill’s method works.
“I must admit to feeling somewhat foolish when I followed Hill’s advice of pre-coating the plate with honey,” Boudreau said. Nor was he thrilled to be working with “compounds used, alone or in combination, as toxic chemical warfare agents during World War I”. But he emerged with a colour photograph. The colours are unimpressive by modern standards: “scummy” turns out to be a rather accurate description. But Hill was the first to achieve them.
As industry veteran and editor of Popular Photography Herbert Keppler has admitted: “It’s doubtful that Hill will ever get the credit he justly deserves.” Perhaps it was a poisoned chalice anyway – and not simply because of the mercury fumes. Hill went on to earn a comfortable living selling petroleum products. But DuCos du Hauron, the man traditionally credited with inventing colour photography in 1876, died in poverty.