A New Colored Movie Process

Introduction

The following article comes from the May, 1923 issue of "Science and Invention" published by Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback is well known to older readers as the publisher of numerous magazines having to do with science and generally aimed at the amateur science enthusiast. He was also one of the first to produce a string of magazines which published science fiction stories; his contributions in that field were so highly regarded that he is commonly spoken of as "The Father of Science Fiction." Be that as it may, a number of his magazines dealt with non-fiction descriptions of bold, new inventions of his day. He was also a prolific inventor who, at the time of his death in 1967, held more than 80 patents.

"A New Colored Movie Process" describes a system of 2-color cinematography which this writer has never seen described before, whether from P D. Brewster or anyone else. In it Brewster lays out two significant suggestions which the astute reader will quickly see are the basis of the Technicolor 3-strip camera: a half-silvered prism beam splitter and two separate gates, one for each color. The rest of the process follows fairly conventional 2-color procedure.

The reader is invited to seek out a copy of "Colour Cinematography" by Major Adrian Bernard Klein, published by American Photographic Publishing Co., 1940 for a comprehensive description of both 2-color and 3-color photographic systems up to that time. Considerable space is given to 2-gate and 3-gate beam-splitting cameras, but only the merest suggestion is made of using a 2-gate variety for 2-color movies as proposed by Brewster in this article! After all, it turned out that there were far simpler ways of deriving 2-color negatives without using a special camera, to wit: bi-pack negative pairs in a standard camera which reindexed the lens focus position back by .005 inch (the thickness of the front film's base). Enough said! Read on, dear reader!

(click for larger image)

Back to Top | Home Page