I’m eating lunch in a restaurant that has replicate newspapers reporting on Civil War battles and other events during the war on the wall. There are etchings for illustrations.
It got me thinking about when photos were first used in newspapers. Any idea when they were first used and when the use became common. Use of color photos?
I assume there were a few color photos from way back. I seem to recall a color photo of Kennedy’s funeral procession. But USA Today is probably the paper that made the use of color photos commonplace. As I recall they started by colorizing the photos off the news wire.
I was a paperboy in my youth, and I remember being shocked one morning opening the bundles of papers dropped by the truck at the end of our driveway. After seeing hundreds of B&W front pages after hundreds of mornings, the launch of the shuttle Columbia was the first color photo I saw in the newspaper I delivered, which was/is one of the largest in Maine.
The first photographic reproduction in an American newspaper was in 1880. The technology became advanced enough to be commonplace in the 1920s.
The first color printing in a newspaper was in 1855. It wasn’t until 1955 that mass, reliable, color printing could be done practically on a newspaper’s schedule. Even then, costs didn’t start coming down until the 1970s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the majority of U.S. newspapers used color on a regular basis.
Also remember, it took longer simply to process color film, making deadlines more difficult for breaking news.
In 1966, the Suffolk Sun on Long Island had the daily comics in color, and ran color photos on the front page. It was probably the first paper to do it regularly?
I skim newspapers from 100 years ago today every morning (thanks to the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website), and my personal observation is that photos were common in the New York papers from at least 1912. By “today” (1919), even most of the papers from smaller towns are running a photo or two on a daily basis. I did a little poking around and it seems that photos started being printed regularly sometime between 1900 and 1905.
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That doesn’t sound right to me. I don’t think they would colorize photos when they could just transmit and publish actual color photos. Transmission of color photos started around 1940, and USA Today didn’t exist until 1982 (all according to Mr. Wiki).
Perhaps you’re thinking of a different newspaper. The “transmitting B&W photography and then colorizing it for printing” thing sounds familiar, but I don’t think it was USA Today. It would have been a lot earlier.
[Too late for Edit]
I agree that “USA Today is probably the paper that made the use of color photos commonplace.” I didn’t mean that part didn’t sound right, only the part about colorizing.
I’ve been researching Wonderland, an amusement park north of Boston that opened in 1906. I had to go through a lot of newspapers to do so. There were a LOT of photographs in the newspapers in the first decade of the twentieth century. And not just the big city papers, like the Boston Globe and the Post – even the local Revere paper ran photographs.
Of course, they were more expensive, and the papers ran a lot more sketches and engravings along with the photos.
The Wall Street Journal had a “thing” for engravings, and I think they still run one on the front page. Back in the 1980s a parody newspaper, the Off the Wall Street Journal ran an entire hack issue. My favorite part was that the usual front-page “interesting thing” piece that’s always illustrated with an engraving was about them buying their first camera, so they could now use photographs. The article was illustrated with an engraving of the camera.
That link is all kinds of broken and I am not sure where it was supposed to point.
The WSJ was unique in that it was published in multiple locations around the country. They faxed the copy to each printing plant, where typesetters retyped the copy for the local press run. Since they were a business newspaper, they didn’t see the need to worry about sending even newspaper quality photographs. Even after USA Today proved it could be done, the WSJ was really slow to change the tradition.
Well of course. What do you think you’d use to take a picture of the camera?
Well, I’d use a mirror, myself.
But the WSJ was written by business types, not engineers.
It seems to me that the Sunday papers were publishing the comic strips in color by the late 40s at least. Of course, that section could be prepared well in advance. I had a great-uncle who founded a business to do photo-engraving for the Philadelphia papers (there were probably 4 at least) in 19teens.
They were doing it a lot earlier than that. Little Nemo in Slumberland, for instance, had a lavish color Sunday strip ever since it started in 1905 – Little Nemo - Wikipedia
And color strips go back beyond that at least to Outcalt’s “Yellow Kid” in 1895
Cool. Thanks for the links.
Actually, it seems to me the key technology was the invention of the process of converting a photograph to those tiny variable-sized dots, the half-tone process. ( Halftone - Wikipedia ) This allowed a photograph to be mass printed using black ink.