On May 17, 1861 — exactly 150 years ago — Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton (who invented the SLR camera that same year) used three projectors fitted with red, green, and blue filters to combine three black-and-white photos of a tartan ribbon shot through similar filters, thereby forming the world’s first color photo (above) and, consequently, the “basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography.”
[bbc]