Chelsea History. Earlier in the series: Lewis Latimer, born in Chelsea in 1848.
The City of Chelsea posted a birthday greeting on Monday for a native son most residents have never heard of, though they have seen his work every time a film from the 1930s or 1940s glows red and gold on a screen. Herbert Thomas Kalmus was born in Chelsea on November 9, 1881. He founded Technicolor, ran it for most of his life and died in Los Angeles in 1963. The company he started in Boston became the name for color itself in American movies.
From Chelsea to MIT to Zurich
Kalmus graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904 and finished a doctorate at the University of Zurich in 1906, according to the obituary the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers published after his death. He came back to teach at MIT, then became a professor of metallurgy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and from 1913 to 1915 directed a Canadian government research laboratory for electrochemistry and metallurgy.
In 1912 he and Daniel F. Comstock, another MIT graduate who had also earned a doctorate abroad on an MIT fellowship, formed an industrial research firm in Boston with a mechanic named W. Burton Westcott. Kalmus, Comstock and Westcott took on technical problems for paying clients. One of them changed the course of his life.
The projector that led to color
Kalmus told the story himself in a 1955 account for Technicolor’s employees, which the George Eastman Museum has posted. A Boston attorney and businessman, William Coolidge, hired the firm to evaluate a motion picture projector called the Vanascope. The firm reported against it. A year later Coolidge asked again, and the firm reported against it again, adding a suggestion: if Coolidge wanted to put money into motion pictures, he should aim higher and put color on the screen.
Kalmus recalled telling Coolidge that “the most he could lose was all he put into this color motion picture venture.” Coolidge and a partner, C. A. Hight, put up the first money anyway. Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was born on November 19, 1915. Kalmus served as its president and chief executive for decades, while Comstock and Westcott held most of the early patents.
A laboratory on wheels
The first Technicolor laboratory was built inside a railway car. The car was fitted out in Boston and, in 1917, rolled over the tracks to Jacksonville, Florida, where the company shot the first feature-length film in Technicolor, The Gulf Between. That earliest process recorded two colors. Work on a three-color process began around 1925, and the 1935 film Becky Sharp is generally credited with opening the color era in motion pictures.
Kalmus’s wife, Natalie, became part of the company’s signature. Her name appears as color coordinator in the credits of nearly every live-action Technicolor feature released from 1934 to 1949. The two married in 1902 and divorced in 1922, but they continued to live together and appear as husband and wife until 1944. Kalmus married Eleanore King in 1949.
Honors and the end
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers gave Kalmus its Progress Medal in 1938 for developing color motion pictures and the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Award in 1952 for Technicolor’s work on 16mm color prints and sound. It made him an honorary member in 1958. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Kalmus Beach in Hyannis carries his name.
Kalmus died of a heart attack at his home in West Los Angeles on July 11, 1963, at 81. His autobiography, Mr. Technicolor, was published in 1993.
The city’s post called him “a Chelsea native who helped change the way the world sees movies.” Where in Chelsea the Kalmus family lived, and where he went to school before MIT, does not appear in the published accounts of his life. Those details remain an open question for local historians.