134 



DISCOVERY 



negatives is made. These negatives are then placed 

 in the slides of the instrument, and colour filters, placed 

 above them, change the light illuminating the various 

 slides. A coloured representation of the design is 

 thus arrived at, and the scheme of colouring is varied 

 simply by changing the filters. Indefinite variation 

 in colour and intensity is provided by a set of some 

 ninety-five filters which, singly or combined with one 

 another, cover the entire chromatic range ; and degrees 

 of brilliancy are produced both by superimposing 

 neutral-grey filters and by adjusting the height of the 

 light-source. By these simple means it is possible to 

 obtain any imaginable colour-scheme, and to brighten 

 or tone down the component colours to any desired 

 intensity. 



Colour Harmony Problems 



Let us now glance at the untilled fields which lie 

 before this remarkable evolution of a mid-Mctorian's 

 beholding in a shop window. 



Released by Adrian Klein's ingenuity from limita- 

 tions which have kept it uniquely associated with 

 three-colour photography — in the shadows sixty years 

 — it emerges suddenly an instrument of great indus- 

 trial value, an active agent designing a further 

 development in our sense of things artistic and 

 beautiful. 



The fact that the artist or designer can project a 

 colour scheme in a few minutes, and change it again 

 and again with a movement of the hand, is perhaps 

 the most arresting function of this instrrmient. In 

 all processes involving colour — printing, painting, 

 weaving — the presentation of the colour itself is gener- 

 ally the most difiicult and arbitrary factor — a factor 

 exposed to misinterpretation and change, and at 

 the mercy of the varying light under which the pro- 

 cess is carried on. The painter, for instance, employs 

 a variable medium. His pigments, never so deftly 

 transferred from the palette to his canvas, undergo 

 a change during transference. He must mLx and re- 

 mix in order to repeat a certain shade or intensity. 

 The light illuminating his canvas changes the painted 

 colours from moment to moment. The ever-changing 

 conditions, chemical and optical, evade finality in his 

 task. 



This finality, so earnestly desired by artists of every 

 calibre — particularly by the "commercial" artist, 

 the realisation of whose painting must be final in 

 printed or woven form — is achieved by the Improved 

 Chromoscope. Here is provided for the first time a 

 means of fixing, altering, and refixing in steady 

 vision patterned rays of decomposed light — colour 

 whose presentation has hitherto been elusive and 

 accidental. 



Apart from the artist and student, there are the 



commercial elders, the manufacturers, into whose field 

 the Improved Chromoscope comes with quickening 

 promise and increased powers. Chief among these is 

 the textUe printer. How aid might be given him 

 suggested itself last year to Adrian Klein, who is 

 adviser on colour physics to the Calico Printers' Asso- 

 ciation, Manchester, and we have seen that aid take 

 shape. The suggestion came to him through direct 

 observation of the conditions under which colour 

 schemes for a textile print are produced. He saw an 



Fig. 3.— THH niPR(i\i;i] cuKUMUbCoPK. 



" army " of artists engaged in making separate paint- 

 ings for each of countless colour-schemes devised. 

 He saw trial colourings made by painting a trial length 

 of countless separate schemes. The time wasted and 

 fruitless labour set him thinking — to the same problem 

 which intrigued our optician sixty years ago he applied 

 himself — and armed with inventive genius and the 

 fortunate concurrence of Adam HQger's celluloid 

 mirrors, he made a ten-picture chromoscope, by 

 which a textile printer unaided can observe his pattern 

 in any number of colour combinations. 



The weaver, poster-designer, interior-decorator, 

 architect, coach-builder, printer, and potter all range 

 themselves in line with the commercial elders who 

 can call on this invention to simplify their craft and 

 render it more beautiful ; and, last in these wide fields, 

 the theatrical producer can summon it to aid him in 

 his colour-encircled scene upon the stage. 



