Science: Color Cinema

Kodakman George Eastman had some guests—Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Michael I. Pupin, General John J. Pershing, Owen D. Young and many another bigwig—at his home in Rochester, N. Y., last week. He showed them some motion pictures in color. He told them how simple the process was. Years of complicated experiments have gone into developing the Kodacolor film, minutes of mechanical adjustment are enough to operate it. Color photography is still imperfect; not all the primary colors can be made to go into the eye of a camera and come out lifelike but such as it is, it now comes within the scope of all who have the price of a Ciné Kodak and a roll of Kodacolor. In the hand Kodacolor looks like any other film; under the microscope it looks like corduroy ribbon. The tiny corrugations are microscopic lenses, made of the film substance, running the length of the film, 559 to the inch. Different from the lens of eye glass or microscope, they resemble rather the lens-like drops of moisture which split up the sunlight after a storm, making a rainbow. Once the process is perfected, they are simple, economical to make. The camera is fitted with a three-color filter: red, green, blue; the red, green, blue rays coming from the subject march each through its own section, pass through the main camera lens; fall upon the tiny film lenses. These act as policemen, guiding each light ray to its own place on the sensitive emulsion; making that place more or less transparent according to the light rays that come in. There is no color in the finished film. It is a pattern of various degrees of transparency and opaqueness. If run off in an ordinary projector, it would throw the ordinary black and white picture on the screen. But if the color filter is inserted, each minute transparent or opaque space on the film will be directed by the microscopic lenses through its own section of the color filter; falling upon the screen in its original color; producing the colored moving picture. The guests listened, looked, lauded Kodakman Eastman.