In 1898, Edward Raymond Turner (1873–1903), a professional photographer, started work at The Photochromoscope Syndicate, London – a company established by the American inventor Frederick Ives (1856–1937) to market his stereo, additive three-colour slide viewer, the Krōmskōp, and its associated Krōmōgram slides. The camera Ives invented to make these, employed an arrangement of mirrors, prisms and filters behind the lens to record all three colour separations simultaneously on a single plate. A beam-splitting attachment placed in front of the lens enabled it to take stereo pictures.

Each Krōmōgram consisted of three monochrome glass positives, printed from the negative, which were then cut into separate slides. These were held together by tape hinges, so they could be placed on the three stepped apertures of the Krōmskōp viewer – each of which held the appropriate colour filter to reproduce the full-colour image.

This process inspired Turner to explore applying similar techniques to moving pictures, though Ives later claimed he suggested the idea to him (Ives, 1926). Turner persuaded Frederick Marshall Lee (1871–1914) – a fellow employee, according to Ives – to fund the project and they signed a contract on October 11, 1898 (Ives, 1926). On March 22, 1899, they applied for a patent for a method ‘to produce and exhibit cinematographic pictures in such manner that they are seen in the colours of the originals’. Turner submitted the complete specification on December 22 and was granted the patent on March 3, 1900.

But, as Turner was soon to discover, this was when the real work began. There were challenges associated with colour-sensitizing film stock to the full visible spectrum, as well as mechanical and optical difficulties to overcome. Progress proved slow, and in 1901 the partners sought to interest Charles Urban (1867–1942), an American prominent in the burgeoning British film industry, in the project. Urban, the managing director of the Warwick Trading Company, the foremost producer and distributor of films and equipment in Britain, persuaded his fellow directors to fund Turner for six months. He commissioned Alfred Darling (1862–1931), the leading cinematograph engineer of the day, to construct Turner’s camera and a 38mm film perforator. These were ready by October, enabling Turner to start making test films of London scenes and colourful subjects, such as a Scarlet Macaw and his own children, in their Edwardian finery, at his home in Hounslow.

Nevertheless, by the end of the year, progress was deemed insufficient by Warwick’s directors and they withdrew. Undaunted, Urban undertook to fund Turner himself, despite his colleagues considering him ‘a damned fool’. He bought out Frederick Lee’s interest in September 1902 (Urban, 2003).

Darling completed work on the projector, modified from the patented design, in February 1902.

Then, on March 9, 1903, Turner died – his death certificate citing heart disease, rheumatic fever and pneumonia as the causes. His widow, Edith, was left with three children to support and Urban was left with a project nowhere near ready for commercial exploitation. Urban asked a long-term associate of Warwick’s, George Albert Smith (1864–1959), one of the ‘Brighton School’ of pioneer film makers, who also ran a flourishing processing laboratory, to take over development.

One of the extant films was probably shot by Smith. However, by March 1904 Smith had concluded that the projector could never be made to work as intended. So, the process was abandoned and Smith immediately embarked on developing a sequential-frame two-colour additive process, Kinemacolor. 

Urban kept possession of Turner’s films and they passed to the Science Museum, London, as part of the Urban Collection, in 1937. When the Collection was relocated to the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, in 2010, this writer conceived the idea of restoring and realizing the films – applying Turner’s methods using modern imaging technology. 

Film archivists, David Cleveland and Brian Pritchard, undertook the task with the collaboration of the BFI National Archive (Cleveland & Pritchard, 2012). Because of the films’ unique 38mm format and mix of negative and positive originals, they were copied frame-by-frame to a 35mm film intermediate, which was then scanned to digital files. These were used to generate the colour composite, at the London facilities house Prime Focus, using the visual effects program Smoke set to emulate the same methods as Turner’s projector. Though the results display the colour fringing associated with sequential-frame processes, the images are steady and the colours remarkably life-like, as promised in the 1899 patent.

The films were shown for the first time, 110 years after they were taken, at a press launch at the Science Museum, London on September 13, 2012, and formed the subject of a BBC TV programme The Race for Colour, transmitted on September 17, 2012.