Hermann Wilhelm Vogel
 Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, with his signature | |
| Born |
March 26, 1834 Dobrilugk, Kingdom of Prussia |
|---|---|
| Died |
December 17, 1898 (aged 64) London, UK |
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (1834 – 1898) was a German chemist and photographer who discovered dye sensitization (1873), a pivotal contribution to the progress of photography. He was an influential teaching for photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose classes and laboratory practice he attended at the Charlottenburg Polytechnic (Berlin).
Works
Vogel’s work in photochemistry was well known in the 1880s. His discovery of "optical" or "color" sensitizers resulted in the introduction of orthochromatic film, which was sensitive to all colors, except the notoriously problematic red end of the spectrum.
Vogel studied at the Royal Industrial Institute of Berlin, earning his PhD in 1863. Vogel's thesis, which was published in Poggendorffs Annalen had the title: Über das Verhalten des Chlorsilbers, Bromsilbers und Iodsilbers im Licht und die Theorie der Photographie (Reactions of Silver Chloride, Silver Bromide and Silver Iodide with Light and the Theory of Photography). This marked the beginning of his research in the photographic process.
From 1860 until 1865, he was an assistant in the mineralogical museum of the University of Berlin, and from 1884 was director of the photo-technical laboratory of the Technical Institute there. From 1864 he was a professor at Berlin's Technische Hochschule (from 1879, the Technical University of Berlin), where he introduced photography as a field of study.
The discovery of "dye sensitization" (1873) made photography much more useful to science, allowed a more satisfactory rendering of colored subjects into black-and-white, and brought actual color photography into the realm of the practical.
