Well Chet, If you're talkin' about the original two-strip color motion picture film process, then THAT goes all the way back to 1916, OR if you're talkin' about the three-strip Technicolor(note the lack of the superfluous 'u' here) process, then THAT actually goes back to the early 1920s but didn't find wide usage until around the late 1930s for even later, due in large part to its added costs.
HowEVER, if you're talkin' about "color" in general, there seems to be a number of different schools of thought about that.
Here's just a couple of those schools of thought:
Now, SOME believe God "invented" not ONLY color but everything else a little over 5,000 years ago, though of course THIS school of thought seems to be lessening in numbers as the years go by, and especially since the early-to-mid 20th Century, though it seems the remaining adherents to this school of thought primarily reside in what is sometimes known as the "Heartland". I'm being American specific here, of course.
And THEN there is the school of thought that "color" along with almost everything else came about by what is known as "The Big Bang Theory"(no, NOT that hilarious TV sitcom...stay with me here) which has been estimated at this time to have happened some 13.7 billion years ago...though I must warn you here that those Eggheads who came up with THIS theory seem to be changin' that number ALL the time.
(...I certainly hope I have answered your question here in a satisfactory manner)
