Wilson Markle (September 2, 1938 – July 25, 2020) was a Canadian engineer who invented the film colorization process in 1970.Coloring Old Movies: Foes See Red, Backers See Green - Chicago Tribune, 29 August 1986 His first company, Image Transform, colored pictures from the Apollo space program to make a full-color television presentation for NASA.
His method used computers to assign predetermined colors to shades of gray in each scene.
In 1983, he founded Colorization Inc., which was co-owned by Hal Roach Studios and International HRS Industries.COLORIZATION - The Museum of Broadcast Communications The word "colorization" later became a generic name.
Patents
An application for the first patent on the process was made by Colorization Inc. on 11 July 1983, listing Wilson Markle and Christopher Mitchell as inventors. It was issued on 1 December 1987 (US Patent 4710805).US Patent 4710805 - Method of, and apparatus for, modifying luminance levels of a black and white video signal - WikiPatents, Inc.
References