Levi Hill, Date of Birth, Date of Death

Levi Hill

American photographer

Date of Birth: 26-Feb-1816

Date of Death: 09-Feb-1865

Profession: photographer, pastor, inventor

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces

Levi Hill (26 February 1816 - 9 February 1865) was an American minister in upstate New York who claimed in 1851 that he had invented a color photographic process.
Borrowing terms previously introduced in France, Hill called his process "heliochromy" and the photographs that it produced "heliochromes", but by analogy to the naming of the then-current daguerreotype process after its inventor Louis Daguerre, Hill's color photographs were soon being called "Hillotypes".
Hill's work was met with skepticism during his lifetime, then for more than a hundred years after his death histories of photography routinely dismissed it as a complete fraud.
Later researchers found that his very difficult process did in fact have a limited ability to reproduce the colors of nature.