Levi Hill

[2] Hill's work was met with skepticism during his lifetime, then for more than a hundred years after his death histories of photography routinely dismissed it as a complete fraud.

Though many were of the opinion that the color in Hill's photographs was added by hand-tinting, he received support from some in the scientific community, most notably Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph.

The claims made for Hill and his commercially unavailable secret process drew both skepticism and wrath from some professional photographers, who believed that clients were putting off having their pictures taken until they could be Hillotyped in color.

In 1851, photographer Daniel DeWitt Tompkins Davie, then-president of the Association of Daguerreotypists, assembled an investigating team that pronounced Hill's invention "a delusion.

[3] The few surviving copies show that the book consists of a rambling autobiography, a history of photography, a cookbook for many other processes, and finally a recipe for making Hillotypes that is so chemically complicated it is practically unworkable.