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Technicolor, Inc. is almost as strange a concern as Pioneer, and its long career, which is to all intents and purposes the history of color in the cinema, has been even more precarious. In 1914, a young graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Dr. Herbert Thomas Kalmus and some of his fellow alumni set out to perfect a color camera for moving pictures. It took them eight years. In 1922, they used their process—named in honor of their college—for their first commercial picture, Toll of the Sea. For the next six years, Technicolor, Inc. prospered mildly because producers found color useful for shorts and special sequences in superproductions. Meanwhile Mrs. Natalie Kalmus, who had posed for the company's early tests, became its color director, which meant that she helped show inexperienced producers, who rented Technicolor cameras and cameramen, how they should be used; and her husband bickered with his associates, principally Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, in whose name most of Technicolor's basic patents were taken out, until he had control of the company. Dr. Kalmus still runs Technicolor, Inc. and his titian-haired wife, still busily connected with the company, spends her spare time explaining in fan magazines that color will decrease dieting among cinemactresses by making them look slimmer than ordinary black & white photography. Soon after sound revolutionized the industry in 1927, overenthusiastic producers took up color also. A rash of color talkies that began with On With the Show and Gold Diggers of Broadway made Technicolor, Inc., which sold film and rented cameras to producers, more prosperous than before but overtaxed its technical resources. Incompetently produced color pictures helped make cinemaddicts sick of them, convinced cinemagnates that color was impractical and extravagant. By this time Technicolor, Inc. had enough money to experiment with its specialty more thoroughly than before.