Had the versatile Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) not been absorbed by the celebrated research career that led to the elucidation of the microscopic structure of the nervous system and secured him the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he might have established the first successful film manufacturing industry of Spain. In his Recollections (Ramón Cajal 1988), Cajal confesses his long-standing devotion to the art of Daguerre. He recounts the circumstances under which he was concomitantly initiated as a teenager to both anatomy and photography in 1868. At the age of twenty-seven, he was an early visionary of instant photography and had successfully cultivated the art to the point of producing ultra-rapid gelatin-bromide plates of his own formulation, aided by his wife and laboratory assistant Silveria Fañanás (1854–1930).

Cajal was convinced that a clear understanding of the theory is half of the pleasure of photography, the other half being the practical remedy of failures of each photographic operation (Ramón Cajal 1988). As a means of recreation and relief from his neurobiological work, Cajal engaged in studies on theoretical and practical issues of photography (Ramón Cajal 1906b, 1907a, 1907c); he published his results in the official journal of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid (Ramón Cajal 1903, 1904, 1906a, 1907b). These endeavours culminated in a voluminous technical monograph on colour photography (Ramón Cajal 1912), one of the early pioneering works on the fundamental physical and chemical principles behind this particular application of science.