The 35 mm width, originally specified as 1+3⁄8 inches, was introduced around 1890 by William Kennedy Dickson and Thomas Edison, using 120 film stock supplied by George Eastman.

[5] With the advent of flexible film, Thomas Edison quickly set out on his invention, the Kinetoscope, which was first shown at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893.

[1]654 35 mm was immediately accepted as standard by the Lumière brothers, and became the main film used in the UK because it was the stock sold to these filmmakers by the Blair company.

A variation developed by the Lumière brothers used a single circular perforation on each side of the frame towards the middle of the horizontal axis.

[9]When the MPPC adopted the 35 mm format, Bell & Howell produced cameras, projectors, and perforators for the medium of an "exceptionally high quality", further cementing it as the standard.

The advantage gained was an optical soundtrack, with low levels of sibilant (cross-modulation) distortion, on both types of sound heads.

However, when used for 3D the left and right frames are pulled down together, thus the standard 4-perf pulldown is retained, minimising the need for modifications to the projector or to long-play systems.

[23] In spite of the uptake in digital projectors installed in global cinemas, 35 mm film remains in a niche market of enthusiasts and format lovers.

[28] In 1916, William Van Doren Kelley began developing Prizma, the first commercially viable American color process using 35 mm film.

Although it had been available previously, color in Hollywood feature films first became truly practical from the studios' commercial perspective with the advent of Technicolor, whose main advantage was quality prints in less time than its competitors.

In its earliest incarnations, Technicolor was another two-color system that could reproduce a range of reds, muted bluish greens, pinks, browns, tans and grays, but not real blues or yellows.

In 1928, Technicolor started making their prints by the imbibition process, which was mechanical rather than photographic and allowed the color components to be combined on the same side of the film.

Although Cinecolor used the same duplitized stock as Prizma and Multicolor, it had the advantage that its printing and processing methods yielded larger quantities of finished film in less time.

[citation needed] In the conventional motion picture format, frames are four perforations tall, with an aspect ratio of 1.375:1, 22 by 16 mm (0.866 by 0.630 in).

[34] The first sound features were released in 1926–27, and while Warner Bros. was using synchronized phonograph discs (sound-on-disc), Fox placed the soundtrack in an optical record directly on the film (sound-on-film) on a strip between the sprocket holes and the image frame.

[36] By 1929, most movie studios had revamped this format using their own house aperture plate size to try to recreate the older screen ratio of 1.33:1.

Known as the "1930 standard", studios which followed the suggested practice of marking their camera viewfinders for this ratio were: Paramount-Famous-Lasky, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, United Artists, Pathe, Universal, RKO, Tiffany-Stahl, Mack Sennett, Darmour, and Educational.

Before the end of the year, 20th Century Fox had narrowly "won" a race to obtain an anamorphic optical system invented by Henri Chrétien, and soon began promoting the Cinemascope technology as early as the production phase.

[41] Looking for a similar alternative, other major studios hit upon a simpler, less expensive solution by April 1953: the camera and projector used conventional spherical lenses (rather than much more expensive anamorphic lenses), but by using a removable aperture plate in the film projector gate, the top and bottom of the frame could be cropped to create a wider aspect ratio.

[42] It was Universal Studios, however, with their May release of Thunder Bay that introduced the now standard 1.85:1 format to American audiences and brought attention to the industry the capability and low cost of equipping theaters for this transition.

These flat films are photographed with the full Academy frame, but are matted (most often with a mask in the theater projector, not in the camera) to obtain the "wide" aspect ratio.

[43] CinemaScope became the first marketable usage of an anamorphic widescreen process and became the basis for a host of "formats", usually suffixed with -scope, that were otherwise identical in specification, although sometimes inferior in optical quality.

VistaVision, however, would be revived decades later by Lucasfilm and other studios for special effects work, while a SuperScope variant became the predecessor to the modern Super 35 format that is popular today.

The Canadian cinematographer Miklos Lente invented and patented a three-perforation pull down system which he called "Trilent 35" in 1975 though he was unable to persuade the industry to adopt it.

[48] Ericson shot his 51st feature Pirates of the Lake in 1986 using two Panaflex cameras modified to 3-perf pulldown and suggested that the industry could change over completely over the course of ten-years.

[52] While the format was dormant by the early 1960s, the camera system was revived for visual effects by John Dykstra at Industrial Light and Magic, starting with Star Wars, as a way of reducing granularity in the optical printer by having increased original camera negative area at the point of image origination.

[56] Because BH has sharp corners, the repeated use of the film through intermittent movement projectors creates strain that can easily tear the perforations.

Therefore, larger perforations with a rectangular base and rounded corners were introduced by Kodak in 1924 to improve steadiness, registration, durability, and longevity.

[57] Their durability makes KS perfs the ideal choice for some (but not all) intermediate and all release prints, and original camera negatives which require special use, such as high-speed filming, but not for bluescreen, front projection, rear projection, or matte work as these specific applications demand the more accurate registration which is only possible with BH or DH perforations.

The increased height also means that the image registration was considerably less accurate than BH perfs, which remains the standard for negatives.