Kodak last week announced that it was discontinuing its venerable Kodachrome film, sending it gently into that good night after 74 long years. Like Polaroid’s discontinuation last year of all instant films, Kodachrome’s demise makes it the latest victim in the transition from chemical, film-based photography to digital sensors, Photoshop, and archival inkjet printers. Though it may seem like an anachronism that has lived far past its prime, the oldest color film was a mind-blowing revolution when it was first introduced in 1935.

I don’t mean to suggest that color photography didn’t exist before Kodachrome—not by a long shot. The first known color photographs were taken in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s process, the foundation upon which later commercial processes were developed in the early 1900s, involved exposing three plates, each filtered by red, green, or blue. The resulting plates could then be projected simultaneously using the same red, green and blue filters, creating what was at the time the most accurate reproduction of color available. Photographic plates in those days weren’t fully sensitive to the full visible spectrum, so this method wasn’t fully exploited until the photographic documentation of Russia by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky between 1909 and 1918.

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