Tag: Mark Twain

The Dawn of the Autochrome

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Young couple with motor car, c.1910. Photographer unknown.

An exhibition of extraordinary Edwardian colour photographs opens today at the National Media Museum, London Bradford.

This exhibition will open on the 25th May. Marking one hundred years of the first practical process for colour photography—the Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers—the National Media Museum presents a major summer show on what has been described as “perhaps the most beautiful of all the photographic processes”.

Today, we take colour photography for granted. Yet, for many years colour photographs remained an elusive dream. One hundred years ago, the dream became a reality when the first fully practical method of colour photography appeared—the Autochrome process.

The Dawn of Colour celebrates centenary of the Autochrome and the birth of colour photography. It reveals the Edwardian world as you have probably never seen it before—in full, vibrant colour. The past isn’t always in black and white.

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The photographer’s daughter Christina at Lulworth cove,
Dorset in 1913 by Mervyn O’Gorman.

• Guardian autochrome gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fred Holland Day
• The Door in the Wall
• Edward Steichen
• Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

The Bowes Swan

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“I watched a silver swan which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes.” Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.

The Silver Swan is perhaps the best known and best loved object in The Bowes Museum. It is musical automaton in the form of a life-size model of a swan, comprising a clockwork mechanism covered in silver plumage above a music box. It rests on a stream made of twisted glass rods interspersed with silver fish. When the mechanism is wound up, the glass rods rotate, the music begins, and the swan twists its head to the left and right and appears to preen its back. It then appears to see a fish in the water below and bends down to catch it, it then swallows the fish as the music stops and resumes its upright position. The whole performance lasts about forty seconds. In reality the fish has been concealed lengthways on a pivot in the swan’s beak and returns to this position. In real life swans do not eat fish.

The Bowes Museum site has more details about John Joseph Merlin’s splendid swan and this page has a QT movie of the automaton in action.