Overview
Leopold Godowsky Jr. (1900–1983), a professional violinist, and his friend Leopold Mannes devised Kodachrome, introduced in 1935. Its distinguishing feature is that it contains no colour couplers in the emulsion at all — the dyes are introduced during a complex controlled-diffusion development. The result was exceptional sharpness and archival stability, at the cost of processing only a few laboratories could perform.
What You Need
- Lived: 1900–1983, United States
- Anchor year: 1935 — Kodachrome introduced
- Strand: overlooked — amateurs who beat the professionals
Steps
The problem as it stood
Fischer's coupler-in-emulsion approach suffered from couplers wandering between layers. Every industrial laboratory was attacking that problem, and colour film remained either impractical or poor.
What he actually did
Godowsky and Mannes, both working musicians who had been experimenting since school, inverted the problem: leave the couplers out entirely and introduce the dyes during development, controlling how far each developer diffuses into the three layers. Kodak eventually hired them to finish the work.
How it worked
Three sensitised layers are developed in stages, with each stage re-exposing and developing one layer and forming its dye. Controlling diffusion depth means each dye forms only in its intended layer. Because the emulsion carries no bulky couplers, the layers can be thinner — which is why Kodachrome is so sharp and so fine-grained.
What it made possible
Amateur colour photography and 16mm colour cinematography, and a record of the mid-twentieth century in colour that has survived far better than contemporaneous chromogenic materials. Kodachrome remained in production until 2009.
What happened to him
He continued at Kodak and in music. The pair remain the standard example of outsiders solving a problem that well-funded laboratories could not, and their names are attached to the film in every history of photography.
Where the credit landed
Godowsky and Mannes are unusually well credited — Kodak promoted the story of the two musicians, which was good publicity as well as true. They are separated into two pages here because their contributions were genuinely collaborative but individually describable, and because splitting them lets each page carry a different half of the story.
Pro Tips
- Kodachrome had no couplers in the emulsion — that is what made it sharp and stable.
- Complex processing is the price; only a few labs in the world could ever do it.
- Discontinued in 2009, after 74 years.
Knowledge Base
What You'll Learn
The best colour film of the twentieth century was invented by two musicians.
Why Kodachrome lasted
Its dyes are unusually stable in dark storage, so properly kept Kodachrome slides from the 1940s still show accurate colour while many later chromogenic materials have shifted badly. The trade-off is that it fades faster than some rivals under continuous projection, and that its processing was so demanding that when the last laboratory stopped in 2010 the film became unusable overnight, whatever stock remained.
Where This Fits
This guide covers one specific part of the history of media technology. The wider picture — how each link in the chain from capture through transmission to display was actually built, who built it, and why the credit so often landed somewhere else — is in A History of Broadcast Technology: The Chain From Capture to Screen, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.
FAQ
Q: What made Kodachrome different from other colour films?
A: It contained no colour couplers in the emulsion. The dyes were introduced during a complex multi-stage development, which allowed thinner layers and produced exceptional sharpness and dark storage stability.
Q: Who invented Kodachrome?
A: Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, two professional musicians who had experimented with colour photography since school and were later hired by Kodak to complete the work. It was introduced in 1935.