IVES, FREDERIC EUGENE (1856-1937), American in ventor, was born on Feb. 17, 1856, on a farm in Litchfield, Con necticut. He was apprenticed as a printer on the Litchfield In quirer, 1869. He diligently studied photography and it was in those early days he first dreamed of a quick and popular photo-mechan ical process of illustration. So expert a photographer had he be come at 19 that he was placed in charge of the Cornell university photographic laboratory. Here he developed a new "swell gela tine" line process by which beautiful illustrations were produced for the undergraduate periodical. At Cornell in 1878 Ives in vented the first process called "half-tone." Although the results were identical with those of today, the process was different. The method now in universal use he invented in 1885-86 in Phila delphia, where, in Feb. 1881, he had begun the first commercial
production of half-tone printing plates (by his first method). In 1881 Ives made the world's first set of trichromatic half-tone process printing plates. Among his other important inventions were the half-tone photogravure (anticipating rotogravure) ; the modern short-tube single-objective binocular microscope; the photochromoscope, a device for optically reproducing objects in both full modelling and perfect colour; also photographs and motion pictures in natural colours. Specimens of his early prints are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Frederic E. Ives was the father of Herbert E. Ives, the outstanding engineer in the development of television and the transmission of pictures by wire. (W. T. I.)