Cinema screens went wide because Hollywood feared losing audiences to television
Until 1953 nearly every sound film was shot in the almost-square Academy ratio. Then television, with a very similar shape, began stealing moviegoers. Studios fought back by stretching the picture, inventing CinemaScope, Todd-AO and VistaVision, and the widescreen formats they created still shape what you watch today.
An aspect ratio is simply width divided by height, written as two numbers with a colon. The story begins with the film strip itself. In 1892 William Dickson and Thomas Edison set the standard frame at four sprocket holes tall on 35 mm film, leaving an image area that works out to about 1.33:1. When optical soundtracks arrived, part of the strip was reserved for sound and the frame shrank to the Academy aperture of 1.375:1.
Television adopted a nearly identical 4:3 shape, which let early broadcasters show old movies without much fuss. That convenience became a threat, so Hollywood went wide. Shane was released at 1.6:1 in 1953, the flat 1.85:1 format debuted that May, and anamorphic systems squeezed a wide image onto ordinary film using special lenses, later unsqueezing it in projection. A 1957 standard fixed anamorphic projection at 2.35:1, updated in 1970 to 2.39:1 to make splices harder to spot; it is often rounded, incorrectly, to 2.40:1. VistaVision took a cleverer route, running film sideways through the camera so the frame could grow horizontally. Lucasfilm revived it in the late 1970s for effects work.
Screens at home followed their own path. Computer monitors moved to 16:10, close to the golden ratio of about 1.618, and by 2008 it was the most common shape for LCD monitors and laptops. Around 2009 and 2010 manufacturers switched rapidly to 16:9, driven by high-definition television and cheaper production, and by October 2012 16:10 held under 23 percent of displays. Apple kept 16:10 on MacBooks until 2021.
Phones pushed the numbers further. Several models adopted an 18:9 format, and the iPhone X uses about 19.5:9. Square video, popularised by Instagram and Vine, can fill nearly twice the screen space of 16:9 when a phone is held the other way.
Source: Aspect ratio (image)
