Gabriel Lippmann. Portrait of Gabriel Jonas Lippmann, French physicist (1845-1921) and Nobel laureate. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1908 for his technique of colour photography based on the interference phenomenon. He was professor of experimental physics at the Sorbonne, Paris. Lippmann invented a sensitive mercury capillary electrometer, plus other designs for instruments including an astatic galvanometer, the coelostat for photography, and a new form of seismograph.