Edward Raymond Turner

Born in 1873, Edward Raymond Turner was an English inventor and early filmmaker whose experiments pushed cinema beyond black and white. He worked at a time when motion pictures were still new, and he became fascinated by the challenge of recording and projecting moving images in natural color.

Turner developed an early color motion picture process that used separate color filters to capture and recreate scenes. Although he died young in 1903 before the system could be fully developed, surviving footage from his experiments is now recognized as the earliest known color motion picture film.

His work was far ahead of its time, and later restoration helped show just how important his experiments were. Today he is remembered as one of the key early figures in the history of color cinematography.