Charles Cros

Charles Cros (born October 1, 1842, Fabrezan, France—died August 10, 1888, Paris) was a French inventor and poet who alternated the writing of avant-garde poetry with theoretical work in photography and sound recording.

In 1860 Cros began studies in medicine, but he soon abandoned them for a life of literary and scientific pursuits. In 1869 he published a theory of colour photography in which he proposed that a single scene could be photographed through glass filters coloured red, yellow, and blue. The three negatives obtained through those filters could be developed to produce positive impressions that contained varying amounts of green, violet, and orange (the “antichromatic” colours of the filters). The three positive impressions, when superimposed on one another (for instance, after being developed in three transparent layers on a single sheet of paper) would recompose the original colours of the photographed scene. Cros’s proposals, which anticipated the subtractive method of modern photography, were similar to more influential ideas advanced about the same time by Louis Ducos du Hauron, and Cros eventually ceded primacy to Hauron.

In his book Études sur les moyens de communication avec les planètes (1869; “Studies on the Means of Communication with the Planets”), Cros speculated on the use of a huge concave mirror with a focal length equal to the distance of Mars or Venus from Earth. Sunlight concentrated by the mirror would fuse the planetary surface of the distant planet in geometric patterns that would presumably be intelligible to the higher forms of life living there.

In 1877 Cros wrote a paper that described a process of recording sound on a glass disc. Like that of his countryman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Cros’s process involved tracing sound waves by the lateral movement of a stylus on lampblacked glass. Cros suggested that this glass could be photoengraved to produce lines in relief and somehow could be used to replay the recorded sound. He gave a copy of his paper to the French Academy of Sciences in April 1877, three months before Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph, but did not patent the process until May 1878 and never made a working model. However, the Abbé Lenoir, a clergyman–science writer, described the Cros process in an article published in October 1877, giving the name phonographe to what Cros had described as the paléophone.

As a literary figure, Cros frequented the salons of Parisian Symbolists and Décadents. With those devotees of the avant-garde, he aspired to create a type of poetry that, through lyrical, rhythmic language and striking imagery, would succeed in evoking the sensations and emotions of the artist. His Le Coffret de santal (1873; “The Sandalwood Chest”) was praised by Paul Verlaine, and Le Fleuve (1874; “The River”), a long poem in alexandrine verse, was illustrated with watercolours by Édouard Manet. An anthology of Cros’s work, Poèmes et proses, edited by Henri Parisot, appeared in 1944.

Cros’s poetical work brought as little reward and recognition as did his inventions, and he died dispirited and alcoholic. In honour of his contribution to sound recording, the Académie Charles Cros in Paris awards annual prizes for the year’s best musical recordings.