The idea of creating a panoramic image filling most of the visual field of the observer is older than the cinema. Paintings of panoramic views were popular in the Victorian era  and magic lantern shows were able to project a 360 degree picture on a cylindrical screen in the 1890s.

In 1900 at the Paris Exposition films shot from a balloon's basket while it drifted over Paris were shown on a screen encircling the audience. Apart from a few more special shows there were no significant developments in widescreen cinema until the 1920s.

The French director Abel Gance made very effective use of the widescreen in his superb historical epic Napoleon (1927). For the final sequence of the picture where the Emperor prepared to march on Italy three projectors were used which either projected a triptych of images or a single panoramic image. The same principle was the basis of the Cinerama process in the 1950s and 60s.    

The most famous film made in Cinerama was How the West was Won (1962) but there were obvious joins in the picture caused by the boundaries between the separate pictures produced by the three projectors.

The letter box screen or Cinemascope was based on a lens designed by Henri Chretien in 1927. 20th Century Fox  threw Cinemascope into the battle against Television in 1953 with The Robe a biblical epic starring Richard Burton. It was popular enough to be taken up by the other major studios but it had the unfortunate effect of discouraging activity on the screen. The ponderous epics which resulted brough us back to the techniques of the worst of the silents. The best guarantees for a successful film are a good script and fine acting not a huge screen but the most desperate innovation to lure the public back to the cinema was 3D.

Warner Brothers began the 3D false dawn with two forgettable films : Bwana Devil (1952) and House of Wax (1953) but filmgoers soon tired of having to wear silly glasses to get the full effect of their movies.  Films made in 3D like the musical Kiss Me Kate (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) were more often seen without the glasses.