Early Cinema: August Plahn: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

The August Plahn Collection at the National Museum of American History includes 1 complete camera, 1 projector head, over 90 parts of cameras, projectors, and editing apparatus, 45 pieces of film, and 282 documents related to the inventor’s work on natural color motion pictures. These materials were given the catalog numbers 71.5, 71.006.01-60, 1994.3059.01-19, and 2008.0095.086.

August Persson Plahn was a Danish-American inventor who worked to perfect an additive three-color film technology for motion picture capture and projection in the early 20th century. Plahn had settled in New York by 1918 and was working to solve the problem that had confronted motion picture producers since the invention of the art – the capture and reproduction of natural color. Plahn’s solution was to build a camera which split the image three ways across the frame of film, each image captured through a different-colored filter - red, green, or blue. The film was projected through a set of three lenses and color filters, combining the three single-color images to create a single natural color image on the screen. Although he was working in isolation, and at a time when many others were working on the same problem, Plahn’s solution seems to have been viable, and he was granted patents for his camera and projector in the U.S and a host of European countries. He formed a corporation, Primo Natural Color Inc., and attempted to attract investment to market his technology, but this venture was unsuccessful. A letter from an interested motion picture executive, C.B. Penney, in document folder 8 (Cat. # 71.5), suggests that Plahn’s process had inspired industry interest. A Primo company report, in folder 6 (Cat. # 71.5), notes that the company’s floundering fortunes were due as much to Plahn’s resistance to relinquish control of his patents as his sudden death in March, 1938. After Plahn’s death, his widow, Josephine Plahn, donated the contents of her husband’s workshop in Brooklyn, New York to the National Museum of American History.

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: 1918-1936
• maker: Plahn, August
• Object Name: August Plahn Collection
• Measurements: overall: 3 in x 21 in x 17 in; 7.62 cm x 53.34 cm x 43.18 cm
• ID Number: COLL.PHOTOS.000022
• catalog number: COLL.PHOTOS.000022
• accession number: 1993.0264
• Credit Line: Gift of Josephine Plahn
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.