The Color That Had to Blink

The first moving colour pictures are not a parade, a sunset or a painted actress. They are a goldfish, a macaw and three children in Edwardian clothes. In the restored footage, the fish glows orange and silver, the bird carries its improbable red and blue plumage, and the children stand still in a garden because standing still was part of the invention.

The pictures were made around 1901 and 1902 by Edward Raymond Turner. For more than a century, almost nobody could see them as colour. The film survived, but the machine required to read it did not survive in working order. What looked like black-and-white celluloid was actually a set of colour instructions waiting for a future projector.

Turner’s story is a small tragedy inside a larger one. He solved a problem cinema had barely begun to name, died before the solution could become a product, and left behind a process that worked in theory more elegantly than it worked in a theatre. His successor simplified it, made a fortune, lost a patent case and watched the commercial system collapse. The first colour cinema was not defeated by monochrome. It was defeated by the difficulty of making colour agree with time.

Three colours, one strip of film

In 1899, Turner and his financial backer Frederick Marshall Lee patented a process for making and exhibiting moving pictures in natural colour. Their idea was to separate colour before the light reached the film. A rotating filter placed in front of the camera admitted red, green and blue in succession. Each black-and-white frame recorded one slice of the scene’s colour information.

The film therefore did not contain coloured pictures in the ordinary sense. It contained a rapid sequence of records: red, blue, green, red, blue, green. To show the result, a special projector had to put those records back together. The filters had to rotate in step with the film, and the images had to land in exactly the same place on the screen. A small error would not produce a slightly wrong colour. It would produce coloured fringes, a doubled edge, or a headache.

The patent was a clever answer to a stubborn fact. Photographic film could record light and dark long before it could conveniently record the whole visible spectrum. Colour photography already had methods for making separate records through filters. Turner tried to make those records move.

He was young, technically capable and dependent on machinery that had to be invented along the way. An engineer named Alfred Darling made a camera for the process in 1901 and a projector in 1902. Turner kept making tests. The images of his children, a goldfish and a macaw were not a finished entertainment programme. They were demonstrations that the colour records existed and could, under the right conditions, be recombined.

Then, on 9 March 1903, Turner died. He was 29.

The shortcut that became a spectacle

Charles Urban, the film entrepreneur who had helped finance the work, did not abandon the project. He asked George Albert Smith to continue it. Smith spent about a year with Turner’s three-colour method and decided that its mechanical demands made it impractical. Three successive colour records required too much speed and too much precision for the cameras and projectors of the time.

Smith removed one colour.

His new system, patented in 1906 and marketed by Urban as Kinemacolor, photographed alternating frames through red and green filters. Projection used spinning red and green discs to restore the colour. It was not full-spectrum colour in the modern photographic sense. Blues and purples were difficult, and fast movement could leave a coloured fringe because the red and green views were taken a fraction of a second apart. But the compromise was fast enough to put before an audience.

Kinemacolor made a virtue of the eye’s willingness to combine images. The screen flashed red information, then green information, at a rate the viewer experienced as a single scene. Colour was no longer sitting inside each frame. It was being negotiated by the projector, the screen and the observer’s persistence of vision.

The effect could be startling. Kinemacolor films carried viewers to landscapes, royal ceremonies and foreign cities in a colour that seemed less like tinting than arrival. A restored print runs at a punishing speed, around 32 frames per second, and its alternating filters can flicker. Yet the surviving images still have the strange authority of a witness: a lake, a procession, a harvest, not recoloured history but light divided and reunited.

Kinemacolor was commercially successful enough to support a company, international licences and ambitious productions. The Natural Color Kinematograph Company produced a colour newsreel of Edward VII’s funeral in 1910 and a colour feature film, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, in 1914. For a few years, colour was not a distant promise attached to Hollywood’s future. It was a British business using a black-and-white film strip and a pair of spinning filters.

The patent was part of the picture

The process had a technical weakness, but its commercial weakness was legal. William Friese-Greene, an inventor with a rival colour system called Biocolour, challenged the validity of Smith’s Kinemacolor patent in 1913. The first petition failed. An appeal reversed that decision in March 1914, and the House of Lords upheld the reversal in 1915.

The result was not simply that one inventor won an argument. Kinemacolor lost the exclusive protection that made its licences valuable. The Natural Color Kinematograph Company went into liquidation in 1915. A process that had depended on controlling a special combination of film, filters and projection equipment suddenly had less power to control who could use it.

The episode is a reminder that an invention does not live by its mechanism alone. It needs a business arrangement, a supply chain, a projector in the theatre and a legal claim strong enough to keep competitors from copying the arrangement. Colour cinema’s history is often told as a march towards Technicolor, as if each better process naturally replaced the last. Kinemacolor instead shows how an imperfect but workable system can be undone by a court before a superior system is ready to take its place.

The film was waiting for us

Turner’s three-colour footage might have become a footnote: an ingenious failure known from patent drawings and a few black-and-white strips. The surviving film remained in the archive of Charles Urban, but the original apparatus was too complicated to make the images visible in their intended form. In the twentieth century, the footage could be inspected without really being watched.

In 2012, researchers used Turner’s instructions and digital reconstruction to assign the appropriate colour information to the surviving frames. The result did not add arbitrary colour to an old monochrome picture. It recreated the operation the original system had described: red, green and blue records combined into a moving image. Research into Turner’s family helped identify the children and date the tests to 1901–02.

Even the phrase “first colour film” needs care. Colour was already entering early cinema through hand colouring, tinting, toning and stencilling. Turner did not invent every route by which a film could look coloured, and the claim to priority depends on whether one means the first patent, the first working process, the first surviving footage or the first commercial success. The museum calls the Lee and Turner system the world’s first motion-picture system for producing natural colours; Kinemacolor was the first commercially successful process. Those are different achievements.

That distinction improves the story. There was no single instant when cinema discovered colour. There were experiments, failures, substitutions and legal reversals. Turner made a record that could not yet be conveniently seen. Smith made a compromise that audiences could see, but not forever. Decades later, archivists made the first machine legible again with tools the inventors could not have imagined.

The goldfish was never merely swimming in a colour film. It was travelling between versions of the future: from a young inventor’s rotating filters, through a dead commercial system, into an archive, and finally onto a screen. Cinema did not wait for colour to be put inside the film. It learned, briefly and beautifully, to make colour happen between one frame and the next.