Cinechrome was adapted from a 1905 patent by William Friese-Greene, which described a system in the camera whereby a prism split the light from the object and passed it through two colour filters, one red-blue and one yellow-orange, and then through the lens, registering two images side by side on the negative. After a brief period running a photographic shop, in 1907 Friese-Greene returned to inventing and continued to develop this process alongside a successive-frame process which would become Biocolour. 

At this point the history becomes complicated. An engineer named Allan Ramsay acquired the rights to all of Friese-Greene's patents (excluding the 1905 patent which was not available) and set up a company to develop them, named Friese-Greene Patents Ltd. Friese-Greene was hired as technical director for a period of four years but was lured away by his friend, the exhibitor Walter Harold Speer, who set up Biocolour in 1911 and acquired the services of Friese-Greene plus the rights to the 1905 patent, the only one not owned by Ramsay and Friese-Greene Patents Ltd. Curiously, therefore, despite Friese-Greene Patents Ltd not owning the 1905 patent, the prism system which it outlined formed the basis of the process which the company would ultimately develop, while Biocolour would attempt to exploit the successive-frame system, despite owning the rights to the prism system in the 1905 patent. 

In 1911 the film journalist Colin Noel Bennett patented a colour system which used two small lenses, one above the other, placed behind a rotating shutter with cut-away sections which worked in synch to expose two frames simultaneously.

Bennett was adamant in his original 1911 patent that his system did not use a prism and so was not derivative of Davidson and Jumeaux's 1903 patent and, by extension, Friese-Greene's 1905 patent, but these revisions clearly derived from those earlier patents and suggest that Bennett was fostering links with Friese-Greene. Indeed, Bennett granted the rights to his 1911 patent to Friese-Greene, facilitating a link between himself and Friese-Greene Patents Ltd. The company was reformed in 1912 as Colin Bennett Ltd, with financing provided by Sir William Pickles Hartley of Hartley's Jams, whose son-in-law, John Sharp Higham, was on the board of directors. For reasons unknown, at this point Bennett turned his back on inventing and returned to journalism. Further patents refining his process were filed in 1915 under Higham's name and also the names of Frank Twynam and Harold Workman, both of whom worked for a company called Adam Hilger Ltd. That same year Colin Bennett Ltd was re-formed as Cinechrome Ltd, without Bennett but still with Hartley and Higham. 

Over the next few years the system underwent further development until it reached the high-point of its success. In 1921 Cinechrome was used to film the state visit of the Prince of Wales – later Edward VIII – to India, which was premiered at the Royal Society of Arts in 1922 and later had a public run at the Stoll Picture Theatre. 

The special film and the special projector required to show it proved a stumbling block to commercial exploitation, and the system was revised again, this time by Cox and Demetre Daponte, who had also worked for Adam Hilger Ltd and who took over the running of Cinechrome with Cox in 1922 after Hartley's death.

In 1925 Cox and Daponte renamed the company, and the process, Cinecolor Ltd and the process was adapted again. Commercial success, however, remained elusive. In 1937 the Cinecolor patents were acquired by a holding company, Chromex Ltd, and passed to Dufay-Chromex, which was at that time exploiting the additive Dufaycolor process but looking for ideas to develop a subtractive process. 

[Reprinted from Brown, Simon (2012). “Technical Appendix”. In Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55, Sarah Street (ed.), pp. 266–8. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.]