Postcards, now 150 years old, more colourful thanks to Swiss
The Austrian Post introduced “correspondence cards” in October 1869, but it was a Zurich lithographer who created an economical and award-winning process to make them more colourful.
Postcards provided a simple way to send a quick and inexpensive greeting, especially for travellers, and they proved to be quickly popular: within a month of their introduction, a million cards had been sold.
However, the first ones were black-and-white, and hand-colouring was the only option.
Enter Hans Jakob Schmid, the lithographer who invented the photochrome process for his employer, the Zurich printing house Orell Füssli. It worked like this: the black-and-white negative was projected onto as many as 16 light-sensitive stone slabs, which then printed in various colours. Because the colour was transparent, an almost infinite number of nuances could be generated with the 16 slabs.
Orell Füssli split its photochrome business into a subsidiary in 1889, and in 1895, the public limited company Photoglob & Co emerged, which granted licenses to London and Detroit, among other places. The process won a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.
At their peak in 1913, 112.5 million printed postcards were sold in Switzerland.
More
More
The colourful world of the Belle Epoque
This content was published on
Colour photos existed before colour photography – but how? The postcards made with this process were extremely popular – and still are today.
This content was published on
Postcards had their heyday at the start of the 20th century. They were a blank, but somewhat idealistic, canvas for propaganda, satire and patriotism.
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.
Read more
More
Orell Füssli – the 500-year-old Swiss printer
This content was published on
The Swiss printing house that started out producing Bibles half a millennium ago now makes its money from... making money.
This content was published on
A new world record has been set on the Aletsch glacier. 125,000 children from all over the world wrote a regular size postcard to send a message about climate change. Patched together, they make up the world’s biggest postcard.
This content was published on
The book “Images of Verbier. The old postcards”, which retraces Verbier’s development from 1900 to 1960, was compiled from 250 postcards belonging to François Luisier, who started collecting 40 years ago and now has some 3,000 postcards in his personal collection, and Jean-Marie Michellod. The book is on sale at Bagnes Museum and at bookshops…
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.