Gabriel Lippmann had a distinguished career as an inventor, theoretician and academic. At the Faculty of Sciences, a laboratory in Paris, France, he became professor of mathematical physics in 1883, a professor of experimental physics in 1886, and, later, director of the laboratory. He stayed active in this position, overseeing the laboratory's incorporation into the Sorbonne, until he died at sea on July 13, 1921. A member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Bureau des Longitudes, he was elected in 1908 as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. Even before he had finished his doctorate in 1875, he embarked on a lifetime of publishing papers and the creation of measuring instruments to accompany research and observation in physics, astronomy, and seismology. Lippmann is most often remembered, however, for developing an early process of color photography . It was for this achievement that he received the 1908 Nobel Prize for physics.

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