Technicolor 2-Color Additive System Motion Picture Camera: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

First Technicolor 2-Color Additive System motion picture camera. Invented and built by Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott, Inc. for Technicolor photography of two-color component images simultaneously from the same point of view. These exposures were made by means of a beam-splitting prism having two color (red and green) separation filters. From this negative a black and white print was processed and projected through special lenses and filters to form the additive color picture on the screen. This camera was used to photograph the first Technicolor additive system feature film, "The Gulf Between", in 1917-1918. This technology was abandoned because it required projectionists to skillfully monitor the strip synchronization. Most projectionists were untrained, resulting in screenings with "the most glaring color fringes anyone had ever seen", according to Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus.

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: 1916-1917
• maker: Kalmus, Comstock and Westcott
• Object Name: Movie Camera
• Physical Description: metal (overall material)
• Physical Description: glass (overall material)
• place made: United States: Massachusetts, Boston
• Subject: Entertainment, Film
• Subject: Invention
• Subject: Motion Pictures
• ID Number: PG.66.074
• catalog number: 66.074
• accession number: 265913
• Credit Line: Gift of Technicolor Corporation of America
• 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.