OSA | HISTORY
OSA Historical Archives
Leonard T. Troland
Herbert E. Ives
William E. Forsythe
Irwin G. Priest
Presidents of the 1920s
John N. Howard
A look at four early Society leaders
Leonard T. Troland
1922-1923
L.T. Troland had seven articles published in the Journal of the Optical
Society of America (JOSA) on a range
of topics, including the optics of the
nervous system, zone theories of vision,
the nature of the visual receptor process and Helmholtz’s contributions to
optics. His paper on Helmholtz, which
appeared in JOSA in June 1922, was
not only a detailed account of Helmholtz’s book on Physiological Optics, but
also a call for an English translation by
OSA as a fitting tribute to this giant of
optics on the centennial of his birth.
That American edition, edited by J.P.C.
Southall, was published in 1924. (To
learn more about the fascinating and
too-short life of L.T. Troland, see the
June 2008 OPN.)
Herbert Eugene Ives
1924-1925
Herbert Eugene Ives was born July 31,
1882, in Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A. Young
Herbert received his first training in
Lippmann did
not use dyes for
color photography;
rather, he relied on
interference effects
on the natural
colors of light.
applied optics working in his father’s
company, Ives Kromskop Co., which
manufactured apparatuses for color photography. In this way, Herbert supported
himself through his student days. After
graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905, he obtained a teaching
fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where he
worked under noted optics researcher
R.W. Wood. The topic of his dissertation
was a detailed study of the technique of
color photography that had been proposed in 1891 by Gabriel Lippmann.
Lippmann did not use dyes for
color photography; rather, he relied on
interference effects on the natural colors
of light. He placed a mirror behind the
light-sensitive emulsion of a photographic plate. The mirror reflected light
rays back through the emulsion, and
the reflected rays interfered with the
incident rays, forming a latent image
that varied in depth according to wavelength. The plate was then developed,
and the resulting image was brilliantly
accurate. Lippmann conceived of the
process several years earlier, but the
experimental problems were severe, and
his first successful images (of a green-and-yellow parrot) were published in
1891. For this achievement, Lippmann
won a Nobel Prize in 1908.
Ives’s thesis problem was to measure
the depths in the emulsion of the laminae of the various colors. The emulsion
depths involved were slightly beyond
the resolving power of available microscopes, but Ives was able to measure
the laminae of the wavelengths photographed by careful soaking that swelled
the gelatin emulsion.
