In 1891, at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, Gabriel Lippmann presented a colour photograph of the Sun's spectrum obtained with his new photographic plate. Later, in 1894, he published an article on how his plate was able to record colour information in the depth of photographic grainless gelatin and how the same plate after processing could restore the original colour image merely through light reflection. He was thus the inventor of true interferential colour photography. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for this breakthrough. Unfortunately, this principle was too complex to use. The method was abandoned a few years after its discovery.
One aspect of the Lippmann concept that was ignored at that time relates to spectroscopic applications. Early in 1933, Herbert E. Ives proposed to use a photoelectric device to probe stationary waves to make spectrometric measurements. In 1995, P. Connes proposed to use the emerging new technology of detectors for three-dimensional Lippmann-based spectrometry. Following this, a first realization of a very compact spectrometer based on a microoptoelectromechanical system (MOEMS) was reported by Knipp et al. in 2005, but it had a very limited spectral resolution. In 2004, two French researchers, Etienne Le Coarer from Joseph Fourier University and Pierre Benech from INP Grenoble, coupled sensing elements to the evanescent part of standing waves within a single-mode waveguide. In 2007, those two researchers reported a near-field method to probe the interferogram within a waveguide. The first SWIFTS-based spectrometers appeared in 2011 based on a SWIFTS linear configuration.