Read up about Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, if you want your mind blown. A Russian inventor hired by the Czar to photo-document the Empire, he worked 30 - 40 years before the photos in the article above. He developed a system of mirrors and filters to take three B&W photographs simultaneously in the red, green and blue spectrums.
Originally, displaying them was only possible with a projector that super-imposed the three images. But computer processing allows the reconstruction of his photographs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Rgb-comp... (That is Alim Khan, direct descendant of Genghis Khan, last of the Mongol rulers. Is your head spinning yet?)
