Edward Raymond Turner (1873 – 9 March 1903) was a pioneering British inventor and cinematographer. He produced the earliest known
colour motion picture film footage.
Biography
Turner was born in 1873 in
Clevedon
Clevedon (, ) is an English seaside town and civil parish in the unitary authority of North Somerset, part of the ceremonial county of Somerset. It recorded a parish population of 21,281 in the United Kingdom Census 2011, estimated at 21,442 i ...
,
North Somerset
North Somerset is a unitary authorities of England, unitary district in Somerset, South West England. Whilst its area covers part of the Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county of Somerset, it is administered independently of the non ...
, UK. In later life, Raymond and his wife Edith lived near the centre of
Hounslow
Hounslow () is a large suburban district of West London, west-southwest of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Hounslow, and is identified in the London Plan as one of the 12 metropolitan centres in Gr ...
in West London. Some of Turner's colour film experiments were carried out in the back garden of this house in Montague Road and showed his three young children, Alfred, Agnes and Wilfrid.
Turner was only 29 when he died suddenly at his workshop on 9 March 1903 of a
heart attack
A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to the coronary artery of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which may tr ...
.
He was buried 3 days later in the churchyard of St Leonard's parish church, Heston, Hounslow. Following his death, film producer,
Charles Urban
Charles Urban (April 15, 1867 – August 29, 1942) was an Anglo-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War. He was a pioneer of the documentary, educational, propag ...
, who had been financing Turner, asked
George Albert Smith
George Albert Smith Sr. (April 4, 1870 – April 4, 1951) was an American religious leader who served as the eighth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
Early life
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah Territor ...
to continue his work.
Lee–Turner colour process
Turner is noted for his attempts to develop what is believed to be the first actually implemented colour motion picture system, initially with financial backing from
Frederick Marshall Lee, then later from
Charles Urban
Charles Urban (April 15, 1867 – August 29, 1942) was an Anglo-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War. He was a pioneer of the documentary, educational, propag ...
.
[Carlaw D (2020) ''Kent County Cricketers A to Z. Part One: 1806–1914'' (revised edition), pp.325–326.]
Available online
at the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians
The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) was founded in England in 1973 for the purpose of researching and collating information about the history and statistics of cricket. Originally called the Association of Cricket Stati ...
. Retrieved 21 December 2020.)
On 22 March 1899, while Turner was employed in the London workshop of colour photography pioneer
Frederic E. Ives, Turner and Lee applied for a British patent on a 3-colour
additive
Additive may refer to:
Mathematics
* Additive function, a function in number theory
* Additive map, a function that preserves the addition operation
* Additive set-functionn see Sigma additivity
* Additive category, a preadditive category with f ...
motion picture process. It was granted on 3 March 1900. In September 1902, Urban bought out Lee's interest and continued funding research and development.
Turner's camera used a rotating disk of three colour
filters
Filter, filtering or filters may refer to:
Science and technology
Computing
* Filter (higher-order function), in functional programming
* Filter (software), a computer program to process a data stream
* Filter (video), a software component tha ...
to photograph colour separations on one roll of
black-and-white
Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey.
Media
The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
film. A red, green or blue-filtered image was recorded on each successive
frame
A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent.
Frame and FRAME may also refer to:
Physical objects
In building construction
*Framing (con ...
of film. The finished film print was projected, three frames at a time, through the corresponding colour filters.
The system suffered from two types of colour registration problems.
*First, because the three frames had not been photographed at the same time, rapidly moving objects in the scene did not match up on the screen and appeared as a blurred jumble of false colours.
*Second, and apparently much worse, mechanical instabilities in the system caused serious overall registration problems, so that the three superimposed images ceaselessly jittered and wove about relative to each other.
![Lee and Turner Colour Projector, 1902](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Lee_and_Turner_Colour_Projector%2C_1902._%287996004472%29.jpg)
When Turner died in 1903, Urban passed on the development of the process to
George Albert Smith
George Albert Smith Sr. (April 4, 1870 – April 4, 1951) was an American religious leader who served as the eighth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
Early life
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah Territor ...
in the hope of creating a commercially viable process. Smith however found the process unworkable, and instead developed
Kinemacolor
Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906. He was influenced by the work of William Norman Lascelles Davidson and, more directly, Ed ...
, a greatly simplified two-colour version that enjoyed a moderate commercial success for several years.
Legacy
Turner's role in the development of colour film technology was not widely appreciated until the UK's
National Media Museum
The National Science and Media Museum (formerly The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1983–2006 and then the National Media Museum, 2006–2017), located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is part of the national Science Museum G ...
produced digital colour composites of his then 110-year-old test films and unveiled them publicly on 12 September 2012.
The modern digital restoration allows present-day viewers to see a more successful combination of the three colour elements than was possible with the original mechanical projection system.
See also
*
List of colour film systems
*
List of early colour feature films
This is a list of early feature-length color films (including primarily black-and-white films that have one or more color sequences) made up to about 1936, when the Technicolor three-strip process firmly established itself as the major-studio fa ...
*
List of film formats
This list of motion picture film formats catalogues formats developed for shooting or viewing motion pictures, ranging from the Chronophotographe format from 1888, to mid-20th century Film format, formats such as the 1953 CinemaScope format, to m ...
References
External links
*
*Lee and Turner on
Timeline of Historical Film Colors', with primary and secondary sources, patents, and photographs of historical film prints.
Edward Raymond Turner entry at Who's Who in Victorian Cinema
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turner, Edward Raymond
1903 deaths
English inventors
Cinema pioneers
1873 births