<P> A pioneering three - color additive system was patented in England by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899 . It used a rotating set of red, green and blue filters to photograph the three color components one after the other on three successive frames of panchromatic black - and - white film . The finished film was projected through similar filters to reconstitute the color . In 1902, Turner shot test footage to demonstrate his system, but projecting it proved problematic because of the accurate registration (alignment) of the three separate color elements required for acceptable results . Turner died a year later without having satisfactorily projected the footage . In 2012, curators at the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK, had the original custom - format nitrate film copied to black - and - white 35 mm film, which was then scanned into a digital video format by telecine . Finally, digital image processing was used to align and combine each group of three frames into one color image . The result is that the whole world can now view brief motion pictures from 1902 in full color . </P> <P> Practical color in the motion picture business began with Kinemacolor, first demonstrated in 1906 . This was a two - color system created in England by George Albert Smith, and promoted by film pioneer Charles Urban's The Charles Urban Trading Company in 1908 . It was used for a series of films including the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India, depicting the Delhi Durbar (also known as The Durbar at Delhi, 1912), which was filmed in December 1911 . The Kinemacolor process consisted of alternating frames of specially sensitized black - and - white film exposed at 32 frames per second through a rotating filter with alternating red and green areas . The printed film was projected through similar alternating red and green filters at the same speed . A perceived range of colors resulted from the blending of the separate red and green alternating images by the viewer's persistence of vision . </P> <P> William Friese - Greene invented another additive color system called Biocolour, which was developed by his son Claude Friese - Greene after William's death in 1921 . William sued George Albert Smith, alleging that the Kinemacolor process infringed on the patents for his Bioschemes, Ltd.; as a result, Smith's patent was revoked in 1914 . Both Kinemacolor and Biocolour had problems with "fringing" or "haloing" of the image, due to the separate red and green images not fully matching up . </P> <P> By their nature, these additive systems were very wasteful of light . Absorption by the color filters involved meant that only a minor fraction of the projection light actually reached the screen, resulting in an image that was dimmer than a typical black - and - white image . The larger the screen, the dimmer the picture . For this and other case - by - case reasons, the use of additive processes for theatrical motion pictures had been almost completely abandoned by the early 1940s, though additive color methods are employed by all the color video and computer display systems in common use today . </P>

When did color movies replace black and white