Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/71

 new age will be epicures of the emotions which comprehended music is so nobly capable of stirring.

No doubt the new age will have solved, in a far more satisfactory way than we have been able to solve as yet, the problem of chromatic photography. When colour influences photographic plates or some contrivance substituted for them, not indirectly by a mechanical sorting-out of tints, but by affecting directly the optical properties of the plates or whatever may succeed plates, we shall have marvellously accurate pictures.

Nor is this all. The kinetoscope, as at present exhibited under various unpleasing names, is imperfect in two ways: first because it is powerless to reproduce colour, and secondly because it gives at best a mere magic-lantern picture violently out of focus, and by its pulsatory motion horribly distressing to the eyes. Chromatic photography will overcome the former difficulty. When we find out how to increase greatly the receptive rapidity of photographic emulsion without spoiling what photographers call the "grain" of it; or when we have improved, as we every year are improving,