A Brief History
On February 26, 1909, the Palace Theatre in London, England, boasted the first public showing of color motion picture film, a product called Kinemacolor invented by English hypnotist and magician, George Albert Smith in 1906.
Digging Deeper
Smith’s invention had been demonstrated to professionals prior to the public display, and the process used red/orange and blue/green filters with regular black and white motion picture film to give the colorized effect.
Kinemacolor was used commercially from 1909 until 1915, because a rival, William Friese-Greene, sued for a patent of a process he called Biocolour and won his case in court. Kinemacolor’s patent and exclusiveness was gone, and the company marketing the process floundered.
Other inventors had experimented with colorizing film even in the 19th Century, but true color motion picture film was not marketed until Kodachrome and Technicolor achieved some success in 1916 and by the 1930s color movies with realistic color appeared but did not become common until the 1950s.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bramesco, Charles. Colors of Film: The Story of Cinema in 50 Palettes. Frances Lincoln, 2023.
Street, Sarah. Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-1955. British Film Institute, 2012.
The featured image in this article, a JPG preview of a WEBM file titled “Coronation Drill at Reedham Orphanage”, filmed in Kinemacolor in 1911 at Reedham Orphanage in Purley, Surrey, is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1929.
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