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A Science Museum Monograph - by D. B. Thomas b.sc, PhD
Her Majesty's Stationery Office London 1969 - First published 1969
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There have been over a hundred processes devised for producing motion pictures in natural colour, and the names given to them range through the alphabet from Agfacolor to Zoechrome. Only a few of these processes had any considerable success; indeed not many of them reached the stage of being seen on the screen of the local cinema.

Before 1920 there was only one natural colour process, Kinemacolor, which was a commercial success (in Britain) and which reached most of the cities and towns of Britain. About a million feet of negative film stock went through the Kinemacolor cameras.

Kinemacolor, invented by G. A. Smith, was simple compared to later processes and it had several serious limitations. It succeeded because of the enterprise of Charles Urban, an entrepreneur with little technical knowledge.

It was he who presented Smith with the idea of inventing a process for producing motion pictures in natural colour and, once a practicable process was devised, it was he who directed the Natural Color Kinematograph Company which marketed the product.

In 1937 Urban presented a collection of documents dealing with the film industry before 1925 to the Science Museum. Dr. David B. Thomas, Deputy Keeper in the Department of Chemistry, has written his monograph with the help of this material.

D. H. Follett
Director
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Before we can describe ways of making motion pictures in colour we need to understand some quite simple facts about colour itself.

White light (sunlight) is made up of a spectrum of colours ranging from violet to red. If we pass sunlight through a glass prism we can view this spectrum on a sheet of paper. We can also combine the spectrum colours to produce white light making use of the phenomenon of persistence of vision.

Thus if we take a circular disc and paint it with sectors representing the colours of the spectrum, on rotating the disc rapidly it will appear to be white, the combination of the colours taking place within the eye, or more correctly the brain, of the viewer.

It is an experimental fact that, for people with normal colour vision, any colour in the spectrum can be produced by mixing no more than three other colours, called the three primary colours.

This idea was first expounded in the 18th century and it was suggested by Thomas Young in 1802 that the reason was to be found in the fact that the human eye has three sets of nerves, each set of which is sensitive to just one of the three colours red, green and blue.
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There are two ways in which we can mix colours. Suppose we project three beams of light on to a screen. If we use a red beam, a green beam and a blue beam, where the three beams overlap we can get white light. In other words the three beams add up to white.

These three colours blue, green and red are known as the additive primaries and are used in additive colour processes. The screen of a colour television set is made up of small elements of these three colours as colour television is an additive process.

If on the other hand we use just one beam of light and produce the colour by the superimposition of dyed images in front of the projector lens, then we need to use the three colours, yellow, cyan and magenta as our primaries. These three colours are known as the subtractive primaries.

A modern colour film, whether still or motion picture, contains mixtures of these three dyes as colour film these days is made by subtractive processes. Yellow is white light minus blue, cyan white light minus red and magenta white light minus green.
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Soon after photography was introduced in 1839 photographs in colour could be seen in the form of hand-painted daguerreotypes.

Although there were some early experiments directed at producing photographs in colour by a natural colour process there was one insuperable difficulty - the light sensitive materials used in photography were only sensitive to a small range of colour, in fact only the blue and ultra-violet portion of the spectrum.

One of the great 19th century physicists, James Clerk Maxwell, was interested in colour and, in 1855, he suggested that Young's three colour theory, briefly mentioned in the introduction, could be used to make a colour photograph.

His idea was to isolate each of the primary colours by taking three negatives, one through a green filter, one through a blue filter, and one through a red filter. Each of these three negatives, although in appearance black and white, would be a colour record of the amount of each particular colour in the original scene.

Positive black and white transparencies were then to be made from these negatives and projected in register on to a screen by means of three lanterns each fitted with the appropriate filter in front of the projection lens. The combination of the three coloured images on the screen would be a true colour photograph.
This scheme was put into effect and the first results were shown at a meeting of the Royal Institution in May 1861.
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The photograph exhibited at the meeting was the first photograph by a natural colour process and marks the birth of colour photography. Since Maxwell produced his colour by mixing light beams this is an additive process and he used the three additive primaries blue, green and red.

One thing puzzled photographers for years - as the photographic plates used by Maxwell were insensitive to the red light of the spectrum, how did he manage to get an image on his plate when the plate was exposed behind the red filter.

Fortunately sufficiently good experimental records were in existence for the experiment to be repeated in modern times.

As a result R. M. Evans found in 1960* (* Journal of Photographic Science, pp. 243-246, 1961.) that although it was true that Maxwell's plates were quite insensitive to red light, the red filter which he used transmitted some ultra-violet rays and the red portion of the subject, a tartan ribbon, emitting some ultra-violet, made an impression on the plate. Even so, with the red filter in place Maxwell needed an extremely long exposure to produce an image of satisfactory density.
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In 1873 H. W. Vogel made the outstanding discovery that the addition of small quantities of certain dyestuffs to photographic emulsions made the plates sensitive to a wider range of colours.

The photographic images produced were still of course, black and white. During the decades which followed the discovery, the spectral sensitivity of emulsions was gradually increased until in 1906 the first panchromatic emulsions sensitive to virtually the whole of the visible spectrum were marketed.

Even as early as the 1890s the increase in spectral sensitivity brought about by Vogel's discovery meant that Maxwell's process came into common usage. The three black and white photographic positives were shown either by multiple projection as in Maxwell's experiment, or by viewing them in register through filters in devices known as chromoscopes. As three separate exposures were needed, only still-life subjects could be taken by this method at first.
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Thus we see that even before the start of the cinema the basic requirements of a colour process for still photography - three records of the primary colours and a method of producing the three records in colour and in register - were widely known.

Motion pictures in colour could be seen in 1896 soon after the birth of the cinema. Like the first photographs in colour, they were hand-painted. Films were shown at sixteen pictures per second and the first films, about fifty feet in length and lasting about fifty seconds, contained over 700 individual pictures.

The colouring was done by girls, each of whom applied one colour only. Although the work involved in hand-painting a fifty foot length of film would seem prodigious, the cost of colouring in 1902 was only 35 Cent (?) per fifty feet of film on top of the usual cost at that time of 21 Cent (?) for the black and white print.
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By 1907 the length of the average film had increased and, with the increase in the number of cinemas, the number of copies required of each film had also increased. (Films in those days were sold outright to each exhibitor. The hiring of films became the usual method of distribution later.)

Hand-colouring soon became impracticable and a method of colouring was devised which used stencils. In general it was the French companies, particularly Pathe, which used the method. By 1910 Pathe Freres employed 400 workers entirely on hand and machine colouring at their factory at Vincennes.

The stencils (one for each colour) were made with machines which resembled pantographs. An enlarged image of one frame of the film was projected on to a ground-glass screen in front of the operator. She traced the outline of the area required to be in one particular colour.

Her pencil, as it touched the glass, brought together two cutting tools on either side of the film, cutting out the stencil image. The film was then advanced one frame and the operation repeated. After the stencil had been made for the whole length of film, it was placed in contact with the film which was to be coloured, and the two films were run through a machine which applied colour through the holes in the stencil by means of a short endless band of velvet carrying the dye. The stencil-coloured films were finally retouched by hand.
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By means of this automation stencil-coloured films were still being produced in the 1920s. It was only worth the expense of producing a stencil when a fairly large number of copies of a film were required. This meant that stencil-colouring was particularly useful only for the more popular films. Although the method may appear rather crude the effects which could be achieved were often quite pleasing.

Colour was also introduced on to the screen by tinting the film by immersing it in a dye which was absorbed by the gelatin of the emulsion. Thus a fire scene would be tinted red, a night scene blue or a sunlit scene yellow. The dye, of course, produced a uniform tint throughout the picture.
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The black and white photographic image consists of finely divided silver which can be converted into almost any insoluble silver salt. When the silver is converted into a coloured salt the process is known as 'chemical toning' and the image is produced in the colour of the compound which replaces the original silver.

Thus if we treat a black and white film with potassium ferrocyanide the silver is converted to blue-green silver ferrocyanide and we get a blue-green image. By choice of reagent it is possible to produce an image of yellow, magenta or almost any colour. The image, being translucent, presents a coloured image on the screen.
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The difference between tinting and toning is that tinting produces a uniform overall colour while toning only changes the black silver image into another colour.

The first natural colour process for motion pictures was derived from Maxwell's first natural colour process for still photographs. Maxwell had simultaneously projected the black and white transparencies of three colour records through the three corresponding filters to produce a colour photograph.

Edward R. Turner projected three frames of a motion picture through filters to produce a motion picture in colour. Turner received the financial backing of F. Marshall Lee and so the process became known as the Lee and Turner process.
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In the conventional motion picture camera the film is moved intermittently with a rotating shutter interrupting light passing through the lens while the film is moving. The Lee and Turner patent *) (*Patent No. 6202 of 1899) describes such a camera in which the shutter consists of three opaque sectors alternating with three colour filters, red, green and blue respectively.

The shutter is synchronised so that successive frames of the film are exposed through red, green and blue filters. The exposed film thus consists of a recurring series of red, green and blue colour records, the records of the three primary
colours which are needed for any three-colour process.

Apart from the colour filter shutter the camera as shown in the patent is conventional. The patent does not state the number of frames per second taken with the camera.
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As photographic emulsions in 1899 were more sensitive to blue-violet light than to the green and red parts of the spectrum, a camera which gave equal exposures with each of the three filters in position would underexpose the green and red colour records.

Lee and Turner in their patent indicated that the opaque sectors of their filter disc shutter could be increased or decreased as desired to produce the required ratio of blue, green and red exposures.

The method of projection was rather complicated. Three consecutive frames of the film were projected on to the screen simultaneously by means of three projection lenses placed very close together.

Each frame of the film was projected three times, first through the upper lens, then through the middle lens, and finally through the lower lens. The colour was provided by a synchronised rotating three-sectored shutter bearing concentric bands of colour filters (as shown).

Suppose we consider a red frame (one which was photographed through a red filter). When it is projected through the upper lens the beam of light passes through the outer red filter of the shutter. It is then moved down to the middle lens and projected through the middle red filter of the shutter.

Through the lower lens it is projected through the inner red
filter of the shutter. The film, of course, moves intermittently and while it is moving the projection light is masked by the opaque portions of the filter disc.

At first sight this method of projection may appear to be unnecessarily complicated. The same effect could have been achieved by projecting each frame once only, moving the film the length of three frames (three inches) at a time. However the strain involved in moving the film three inches intermittently would have been too great.

Later systems based on the Lee and Turner process attempted to obviate this difficulty by reducing the frame height (see page 36) or by placing the frames side by side. None of these variants which appeared 1912-1925 proved wholly successful.

During 1901 Lee withdrew his backing and Turner approached Charles Urban, at that time Managing Director of the Warwick Trading Company, one of the early British motion picture companies.

Charles Urban (1867-1942) was born in Ohio and spent his boyhood in Cincinnati. In the early 1890s he went from Ohio to Detroit and opened a stationery shop. He then became a phonograph salesman introducing the machine into offices for dictation purposes.

In this way he became associated with Edison inventions and after 1894 managed a phonograph and kinetoscope parlour on Woodward Avenue, Detroit. He obtained the agency rights in Michigan of the Vitascope, the first American motion picture projector, in 1896.

He then came to England as the London manager of Maguire and Baucus, the company marketing Edison films in England. In 1897 he renamed the London firm "The Warwick Trading Company" after its offices in "Warwick Court". Soon after this the company began making its own films.

As a result of Urban's drive the company prospered and sales rose from £10,500 in 1897 to more than £45,000 in 1901. By this time it was the leading British film company.

During the Boer War Urban had three cameramen in the field filming the campaign, producing the first war films ever shown. He distributed the films of several British and French film makers including Williamson of Brighton, Melies of Paris, Mottershaw of Sheffield, Lumiere of Paris and G. A. Smith of Brighton. The Warwick Trading Company also marketed cameras, projectors and other motion picture apparatus much of it made by Alfred Darling of Brighton.
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When Turner approached Urban with the idea for producing and exhibiting colour films, Urban took to the subject with his usual enthusiasm and his company financed Turner's work for six months.

A camera for the Lee and Turner process made of aluminium was built by Darling of Brighton for the Warwick Trading Company in October 1901. A curious feature of the camera was the use of nonstandard film. Instead of 1 3/8" (= 35mm.), the film was 1 1/2"(= 38 mm.) in width.

The perforations were round with a 1 in. pitch, two perforations appearing between each frame. A special perforating machine to produce the film was built by Darling at the same time.

A three-colour projector was supplied by Darling in February 1902, but the design, manufacture and fitting of lenses was not completed until April 1902. Unfortunately Turner died of a heart attack while working in his laboratory soon afterwards.
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'As soon as the handle of the projecting machine was worked the three pictures refused to remain in register and no knowledge that any of us could bring to bear upon the matter could even begin to cure the trouble ...

The difficulty is mainly due to the fact that the cinematograph pictures are small to begin with (about the size of a postage stamp), and they have to be enormously magnified in exhibiting, as you all know. The slightest defect in registration is pitilessly magnified !' (*G. A. Smith : Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. LVII, 11th December, 1908, pp. 70-76.)
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In 1902, after Turner's death, Urban acquired the patent rights of the Lee and Turner process from Turner's widow. Urban had insufficient technical knowledge to conduct research on a possible motion picture colour process, but he had one associate, George Albert Smith, who had an interest in science and who also had some of that initiative which Urban expected of his employees.

Smith (1864-1959) had been a photographer in Brighton before he took up cinematography in 1897. He produced his first films for the Warwick Trading Company in 1898, and, in 1900, signed a two-year exclusive contract with Urban's company for the distribution of his films.

Urban agreed to finance work by Smith on improving the Lee and Turner process.
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After November 1902 Smith and Urban decided to use standard gauge 35 mm film and the Lee and Turner camera made a year earlier was modified to take the standard gauge.

The three-colour projector was clearly impracticable and a second method of exhibiting the films was attempted. This involved tinting each individual frame with the appropriate colour.

A frame representing the red colour record would be tinted red, the blue colour record tinted blue and the green colour record tinted green, each colour recurring with every third picture. In this way the tinted film carried its own filter and could be projected in a conventional 35 mm film projector.

When projected at three times the normal speed an impression of natural colour would result from the phenomenon of persistence of vision. At lower projection speeds a three-colour sequential system like this (one which projects the three colours consecutively rather than simultaneously) produces colour flicker or pulsating colour.
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A tinting machine was built - but it was not a success probably because of the difficulty of obtaining an even coating of dye on each frame. Also it may have been found too difficult to project the film at sufficient speed without the film breaking.

This was Urban's last attempt to introduce colour on to the film itself. In all the later work with which he was associated a rotating filter disc on the projector was used as the source of colour.

As a result of these discouraging attempts at projecting a three-colour film through filters, Smith began in 1902 to devise a simplified process which resulted in the first commercially successful natural colour process for motion pictures, Kinemacolor. (As Urban was an American, the word is always spelt without a 'u'.)

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While three colours are necessary to reproduce a scene accurately, Smith found that a two-colour process using the colours red and green could produce quite pleasing and acceptable results.

This compromise immediately simplified the Lee and Turner method and formed the basis of a practicable colour process. Using just two colours instead of three the taking and projecting speeds could be reduced to 32 frames per second and this reduced both the cost of film and wear on the film in the camera and projector.

Smith further improved the Lee and Turner process by producing the first panchromatic motion picture film. Panchromatic plates for still photography were first introduced in 1906, but motion picture film at that date was still not sensitised to the whole of the spectrum.

Indeed panchromatic film stock was not generally available until about 1919. Despite his lack of chemical training Smith was able to formulate a treatment of existing motion picture film which enabled him to produce a product with sufficient red sensitivity for the purpose of colour cinematography.

His method was to bathe the negative film stock in a sensitising dye solution, a method which may tend to produce spots and other defects on the processed film. Panchromatic film stock is generally made by incorporating the sensitising dyes into the emulsion at the time the emulsion is prepared.
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The first trial of the new process took place outside Smith's house at Southwick, Brighton. Urban recalled the occasion in the following words: *) 'One Sunday we were ready for the first real two-colour test.'

*) Typewritten notes dated 1921 in the Science Museum Urban Collection. (The scene described here by Urban is so similar to that depicted in the three-colour film shown on page 8 that it seems that he may have confused the two events.)


It was a beautiful sunshiny day. Smith dressed his little boy and girl in a variety of colours, the girl was in white with a pink sash, the boy in sailor blue waving a Union Jack; We had the green grass and the red brick house for a setting. This was July 1906.

'It took about thirty seconds to make the exposure on a specially prepared negative film after which we went into Smith's small darkroom to develop the results in absolute darkness.

'Within two hours we had dried the negative, made a positive print of the 50 feet length, developed and dried it - and then for the grand test.
'Even today - after seventeen years (s/'c), I can feel the thrill of that moment, when I saw the result of the two-colour process - I yelled like a drunken cowboy -"We've got it - We've got it" '.

Smith applied for a patent for the process in November 1906.* (* Patent No. 26671 of 1906.) He described the process as follows: 'An animated picture of a coloured scene is taken with a bioscope camera in the usual way, except that a revolving shutter is used fitted with properly adjusted red and green colour screens. A negative is thus obtained in which the reds and yellows are recorded in one picture, and the greens and yellows (with some blue) in the second, and so on alternately throughout the length of the bioscope film.

'A positive picture is made from the above negative and projected by the ordinary projecting machine which, however, is fitted with a revolving shutter furnished with somewhat similar coloured glasses to the above, and so contrived that the red and green pictures are projected alternately through their appropriate colour glasses.

'If the speed of projection is approximately 30 pictures per second, the two colour records blend and present to the eye a satisfactory rendering of the subject in colours which appear to be natural.

The novelty of my method lies in the use of two colours only, red and green, combined with the principle of persistence of vision.'
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The degree of accuracy with which a two-colour additive process can reproduce colours depends on the precise colour transmission of the taking and projection filters. At the time of Smith's patent there were on the market tricolour filters for still colour photography transmitting red, green, and blue respectively.

The patent suggests that at this time Smith was using just the red and green tricolour filters in taking and projecting Kinemacolor. In practice it was found that this produced a fairly acceptable representation of colours (in rather warm tones) except tor subjects predominantly blue such as the sky or the sea which tended to appear too dark and of an unnatural colour.

In order to produce a more acceptable colour rendering a blue-green filter (one transmitting a little blue as well as green) could be substituted for the tricolour green filter. However, a two-colour process can never reproduce all colours of the spectrum accurately - any choice of filters must be a compromise - and the increase of blue transmission of the green filter produced deterioration in the reproduction of greens. According to one report grass and green foliage tended to be reproduced as a bronze brown.
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In fact when we examine Kinemacolor apparatus we find that a number of different types of filter were used, the choice depending on the nature of the subject and the light conditions.

On a dull day a very light pair of filters (a pair very lightly dyed and transmitting a high proportion of the incident light) was a necessity in order to get a negative which was not badly underexposed.

The taking filters were made either of glass or gelatin while the projection filters were of gelatin. Each projectionist was required to adjust the projection filter before use. The red section of the filter was of a single thickness of gelatin, the green section was of double thickness over part of the green area.

The projectionist adjusted the area of the double thickness until the screen illumination appeared yellow-white. An orange tint on the screen indicated that the double portion of the green filter was too large; a greenish cast indicated that it was too small.

In 1910-11, when Kinemacolor was beginning to achieve success, Colin N. Bennett gave assistance to the Natural Color Kinematograph Company in the design of filters. He also wrote 'On Operating Kinemacolor', a 25-page booklet of instructions for Kinemacolor exhibitors.
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Smith and Urban had an agreement that each was to participate equally in the profits accruing from the new process. While Smith had done virtually the whole of the work in inventing and developing the process, Urban was just the man to bring the colour films before the public.

He had by now settled down in England having married the daughter of a Glasgow University professor. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1906. By this time he was probably the most successful man in the industry.

The Warwick Trading Company, which he founded, was by 1903 publishing a larger number of films than any other English company. In that year he broke away from the company and formed the Charles Urban Trading Company marketing films and apparatus.

The films made and distributed by the C.U.T.C. were mainly travel, natural history and newsreel films. In this respect it was unlike other film companies and reflected Urban's idea that the film was to be an outstanding educational medium.

The natural history films in particular were a great success. 'Unseen World', a series of films taken through the microscope by F. Martin Duncan, was shown at the Alhambra for a season (1904-5), and received a very warm reception.
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In the design of apparatus Urban was assisted after 1905 by Henry W. Joy. The Urban-Joy perforator appeared in 1906. The Urban-Joy antifiring device, a shutter to prevent the firing of inflammable film when projectors broke down, was another of their inventions.

The first demonstration of Kinemacolor took place on May 1 st, 1908 on the occasion of the inauguration of Urbanora House, the luxurious new premises of the C.U.T.C. in Wardour Street.

The audience were mainly newspapermen. The Morning Post described the demonstration as 'The great photographic event of the moment.' The Daily Telegraph as 'A remarkable advance'.

A further demonstration was given to the Lord Mayor of London, the sheriffs of London and civic dignitaries on July 23rd, 1908. At this time very little Kinemacolor film was in existence and the demonstrations consisted of a few experimental samples.
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The most important of these early demonstrations accompanied a lecture given by Smith before an audience at the Royal Society of Arts on December 9th, 1908. The lecture was reprinted in the Society's journal.

This demonstration was considered important by Smith and Urban as they hoped that by lecturing on the subject before a distinguished society the process would gain respect as a scientific advance, instead of being regarded as an entertaining novelty.

By this time Smith had slightly modified the method of projection described in the patent. It was impossible to get a true grey or white by mixing the two colours red and green. The third primary, blue, was needed.

In the patent the rotating shutter of the projector consisted of red and green filters separated by opaque wings which masked the projector light while the film was moving. By substituting an additional dark blue or violet filter for each of these opaque portions of the shutter Smith found that he was able to improve the overall colour rendering of the films.

When the projector was run without film, the screen appeared white. This method of introducing the third primary, blue, into the pictures may not have been very successful for it appears to have been abandoned when Kinemacolor entered the cinema houses.

Although the variety of Kinemacolor films was very limited, the management of the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue under Alfred Butt (later Sir Alfred Butt) who was present at the Urbanora House demonstrations, signed a contract with Urban to exhibit Kinemacolor before the public.
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The opening display took the form of a special matinee on February 26th, 1909. This was the first public cinema exhibition of colour moving pictures by a process which did not depend on hand or mechanical colouring.

Following this successful opening a Kinemacolor item was included in the daily programme at the theatre for the next eighteen consecutive months from March 1st, 1909. For the first time Urban began to get a return on his investment.

In March 1909 Urban set up the Natural Color Kinematograph Company to handle the production and distribution of Kinemacolor films. Smith's interests in the process were bought for £5,000, but his services were retained for a further five years at a fee of £500 a year.

During 1909 Kinemacolor projectors were made by fitting the rotating colour disc shutter to an ordinary Urban bioscope projector and running it at double speed. This was an unsatisfactory arrangement and resulted in excessive wear on the film.

In the conventional bioscope projector the film is moved intermittently by what is known as 'dog' motion. The film below the film gate is struck by a revolving eccentric roller or dog which moves the film along the length of one frame.

For Kinemacolor films shown at twice the normal speed this movement needed modification and the special projectors, designed by Joy and introduced in March 1910, had a dog which was composed of two eccentric rollers.

One of these rollers is placed very near to the central line of the dog shaft and so describes a small circle; the other, known as the main dog, is placed in the usual position. The small dog strikes the film before the main dog and disturbs the film from rest immediately before it is struck by the main dog. This has the effect of relieving the strain on the film and so prolonging its life.

The Kinemacolor projector was heavier and more substantially built than conventional machines to reduce vibration which would otherwise occur during the double speed operation.

In British theatres and cinema houses the Kinemacolor projector was never hand-operated but was always attached to a motor which governed the speed. For New York, where motor driven machines were apparently against regulations in 1910, a specially geared machine was produced which could be turned by hand without too much fatigue.

The Kinemacolor cameras (made by Moy and Bastie) were conventional bioscope cameras fitted with a synchronised filter shutter. As the negative film was run through the camera once only there was no need to modify the intermittent mechanism to reduce film wear.

With interest in Kinemacolor growing Urban resigned from his position as managing director of the C.U.T.C. in January, 1910 to devote all his time to exploiting Kinemacolor.

In England Kinemacolor could still be seen in only one theatre - the Palace, London; but in the spring the first colour performances were given in the provinces. Nottingham and Blackpool were the first provincial towns to see Kinemacolor, on March 24th, 1910.

The Kinemacolor film of the funeral of King Edward VII provided a break-through in that it was a news subject that cinemagoers wanted to see in colour. It was shown in Glasgow, Derby, Nottingham, Blackpool and Burton-on-Trent in May 1910. In June Kinemacolor arrived at Leicester and Birmingham.
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A Kinemacolor headquarters (80-82 Wardour Street) was opened on June 1st, 1910. In September 1910 the Natural Color Kinematograph Company issued a 96-page Kinemacolor handbook publicising the new machines which were now available for exhibitors.

The subjects of Kinemacolor films were still topical news-reels such as royal events, Ascot and Richmond Horseshow.

Although a Kinemacolor item was included each night at the Palace Theatre, it still remained predominantly a music-hall.

Urban now had sufficient Kinemacolor film to put on a complete Kinemacolor programme and looked around for a London theatre which he could convert into the first Kinemacolor cinema.

The only one he could lease was the Scala, not entirely to his liking as he did not think it was in a very good position (off Tottenham Court Road) and was rather smaller than he would have liked, seating 920. He was not used to doing things by halves.
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The opening performance at the Scala took place on April 11th, 1911. The highlights of the programme at the cinema during the first few months were news events such as the unveiling of the Queen Victoria Memorial (May), the Coronation (June), the Naval Review (June), and the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon (July).

The usual policy in the cinemas of the day of a weekly or twice weekly change of programme was disregarded and programmes ran for two months or more.

The first Kinemacolor dramas and comedy films were now being produced at studios in Hove, Sussex during the summer months and at Nice, France during the winter. The actors and actresses were the twelve members of a repertory company employed by the Natural Color Kinematograph Company.
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In October 1911 the Bioscope wrote of the 'almost sensational advance of Kinemacolor'. 'Within the year - almost within the last six months - Mr Charles Urban's Kinemacolor process has come right to the front, and has become a formative influence upon the future of the business, the importance of which cannot be overestimated.

"Colour" has become the sine qua non of the picture theatre programme, and one cannot pass along the streets without seeing from the announcements of exhibitors that they are fully alive to this, and, if they have not a Kinemacolor licence, they are making a special feature of tinted or coloured films in order to cope with public demand.'
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Kinemacolor's greatest success came in the following year with a 16,000 feet (two and a half hour) film of the Delhi Durbar of 1911 which opened at the Scala on February 2nd, 1912.

This was an ideal subject for the process with plenty of colour and pageantry under the bright sun in Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. This was the first time a cinema audience had been expected to sit through a two and a half hour film on one subject; the longest films produced before 1912 were three reels in length lasting 45 to 60 minutes. The Birth of a Nation' (first shown at the Scala in 1915) and other big feature films were still several years away.
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Urban's own account of the production of the film is as follows :* 'We were met in India by Sir John Hewitt who had charge of all arrangements re the Durbar etc, he gave me a half hour to tell what we required but drove about with me the entire afternoon in order to select the positions I wanted. He was as fascinated as anyone. It is worthy for the sake of the record to say the principal cameraman was Joseph de Frene.

'We had the choicest of all possible positions, the officials afforded us the best of protection. They had heard rumors that rival film companies were bent on damaging or destroying our pictures and inasmuch as the King expected to see these pictures in London, it was up to the Army to see that we got them safely there. Each night we used to develop the negatives exposed during the day, and bury them in cases dug in the sand in my tent with a piece of linoleum and a rug on top of them, a pistol under my pillow and armed guards patrolling my camp.

'When I arrived in London one month after our competitors had hurried after the Delhi ceremonies (I went to Calcutta after the Elephant Pageant) I was met on every side with cries of derision.

4 The shutter of the Lee and Turner projector (shown overleaf). In this photograph the red portions of the filters are reproduced as dark grey, the green portions as medium grey and the blue portions as light grey.

6 A row of nine Edison Kinetoscopes at Urban's 'Phonograph and Kinetoscope Parlor' in Detroit, 1895

7 Experimental Lee and Turner 38 mm. film showing the unusual perforations and the colour records recurring every third frame (1901-02)

8 The perforator for Lee and Turner 38mm. film. The film was wound between the two cylinders, the upper one being a punch the lower one a die.
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9 Urban's three-colour filter-tinting machine for 35 mm. film (1902). Made by Braun and Co., King's Cross

10 George Albert Smith in his office at St. Ann's Well, Hove, 1899
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11 George Albert Smith, (by courtesy of the National Film Archive)
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12 Two Kinemacolor demonstration films (35 mm)

13 left; The Kinemacolor film of the Coronation of King George V.

14 Filter disc of a Kinemacolor projector. The shaded portion of the green sector represents a double thickness of gelatin.
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15 Henry W. Joy
16 The programme of the first public presentation of moving pictures in natural colour.
17 Kinemacolor projector (rear). The filter disc comes between the light source and the film. The 'dogs' which advance the film intermittently appear immediately below the film gate.
18 Kinemacolor projector (front view).
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