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Photos from the past - in colour

By Daniel Smith on Feb 4, 10 03:03 PM

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When you see snapshots from the early 20th Century they're usually in faded black and white or sepia.

However, when Tsar Nicholas II tasked Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii with taking a photographic survey of the Russian Empire, the leader picked a very clever man.

The chemist-turned-photographer was well ahead of his time and managed to take incredible, vivid colour images like the one above of a group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, studying with their teacher.

And here we have the wide girth of The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan, who was the ruler of an autonomous city-state in Islamic Central Asia.

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For more pictures and details of how Prokudin-Gorskii managed to take them, click here.

Weird Science Factoid: Antarctica has as much ice as the Atlantic Ocean has water. And that's why we shouldn't melt it...

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Authors

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.

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