1908: Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process is demonstrated at a scientific meeting in Paris.

1908? Really? It seems as if most of the '30s movies were produced in black-and-white, with the occasional color blockbuster like Gone With the Wind. Even the 1940s seemed to reserve color for big-budget productions. Were color movies really around 100 years ago?

Yes. But no.

British inventor Edward Turner actually received a patent on a three-color motion picture process in 1899. The problem is, his system didn't work all that well. He teamed up with Charles Urban, an American expatriate who was already a force in the fledgling British film industry, in 1901. Turner died soon thereafter, and Urban put Albert Smith on the project.

Smith couldn't make Turner's process function and decided in 1906 to try a simpler two-color system using standard black-and-white film. But, instead of exposing the then-standard 16 frames a second, the new process exposed 32 frames. A spinning wheel of transparent filters exposed alternate frames in red and green. A similar wheel was used to project the film, and just as persistence of image makes movie frames merge into seemingly continuous motion, so the viewer's brain merged the two partial-color images into full color.

Sort of. The system was notoriously deficient in presenting blues and getting a true white. And because the red frame and the green frame were shot 1/32 of a second apart, rapid motion caused color fringing where the red and green images didn't exactly overlap. (Not that we've ever seen a digital entertainment technology that blurs with rapid motion. Oh, no.)

Urban previewed the system for the press in London before giving it a scientific debut in Paris, where film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière attended. Kinemacolor got its name in 1909 and was used to film George V's coronation as emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar in 1912.

The process was more economical than the frame-by-frame hand tinting employed by some producers at the time, which sometimes used stencils to create several hundred color prints for commercial distribution. Kinemacolor also spawned some offshoots, including color-wheel systems that exposed side-by-side, rather than alternating, red and green images.

Kinemacolor had plenty of drawbacks. It was one thing for a top-notch cinematographer to synchronize the spinning color wheel with the camera shutter, but quite another to expect projectionists all over the world to master the complicated system, even if their employers were willing to pay for the expensive equipment. Urban also had to fight patent battles. Then came World War I, which -- besides its tremendous toll in blood -- devastated European economies.

Kinemacolor never caught on in the United States, some say because of opposition from the Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust of producers and film-stock suppliers (namely Eastman) that had huge power in the film industry.

Starting in the late teens, it also had to face a superior technology, one that used stationary prisms instead of moving wheels to film and project color separations. Devised by MIT-trained engineers in Boston, it was called: Technicolor.

Source: Various

In the 105 years since the Wright Brothers took to the air, dreamers, engineers and aviation buffs have designed every kind of airplane imaginable in a never-ending quest to fly higher, faster or further. Some were innovative, some were beautiful and some even made history. Others, well, let's just say they must have looked good on paper.

Here's a tribute to some of those that surely looked better on paper.

Tupolev TU- 144

The Concorde gets all the love, but Russia's Tupolev TU-144 was the first supersonic transport and the only commercial plane to exceed Mach 2. The "Concordski" was fast but plagued by bad luck. Three crashes -- including a dramatic mid-air breakup during the 1973 Paris Air Show -- relegated it largely to a lifetime delivering mail. It was mothballed in 1985 but briefly brought back a few years later as a research plane.

The Comet was the premiere commercial jet airliner and a landmark in British aeronautics when it first flew in 1949. Today it's better known for its atrocious safety record. Of the 114 Comets built, 13 were involved in fatal accidents, most of them attributed to design flaws and metal fatigue.

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The “Spruce Goose” was either a brilliant aircraft years ahead of its time or the biggest government boondoggle ever. By far the largest aircraft ever conceived -- its wingspan was 319 feet -- the Spruce Goose was intended to be a military transport plane. But it wasn't finished until well after World War II ended, rendering it both obsolete and irrelevant. It only flew once.

The Zubr was as useless as it was ugly. Not only was it incapable of flying with the landing gear retracted, the airframe was so highly stressed the plane could disintegrate without warning. If that wasn't enough, it couldn't take off with a payload much heavier than a few cartons of cigarettes. The Polish Air Force had a few in its fleet during World War II, but none of them saw combat.

Cool name, lousy plane. Dr. William Christmas didn't know the first thing about planes when he designed one for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and it showed. He didn't think the plane needed wing struts, so of course they fell off during the plane's maiden flight in 1918.

With its carbon-composite construction, unique design and rearward-facing turboprop engines, the Starship was a groundbreaking aircraft. But it was slow, difficult to fly and a bear to maintain. It took to the air in 1989, but Beechcraft only sold a few of the 53 it built.

The Hiller VZ-1 hovercraft must have looked good on paper, because it sure didn't look good in the air. The idea was simple -- a fan provides lift and the pilot steers by shifting his weight. The Defense Department loved it until it saw the Pawnee in flight. It was good for just 16 mph and it tended to be uncontrollable. The project was killed in the late 1950s.

Defense Department projects are famous for cost overruns, and General Dynamic’s flying wing bomber was a doozy. The Flying Dorito was the most troubled of the stealth aircraft projects the Pentagon embraced during the 1980s, experiencing problems with its radar systems and use of composite materials. When the projected cost of each plan ballooned to $165 million, a Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney killed it in 1991.

With its anemic engine, poor maneuverability and gunner blocking the pilot's view, the B.E. 2 was doomed from the start. German aces had no problem shooting them down during World War II, making it just about as useless as a fighter. It had no problems against German Zeppelins, though, so the plane lived out its days attacking them instead.

The XB 15 was the largest plane ever built in the United States until the Spruce Goose came along. The heavy bomber was so massive it had passageways in the wings and bunks for the crew. But big planes need big engines and no one made one big enough to give the XB any kind of speed for its maiden flight in 1937. The plane maxed out at 200 mph, and the U.S. Army Air Corps killed the project. The only XB ever built saw duty as a cargo plane in the Caribbean during World War II.