A place to start: http://colorist.org/wiki/History_of_Telecine

The Famous Rank Cintel MKIII

In the mid 1970’s Rank Cintel designed the MKIII telecine a radical new concept at the time, where the scan patch comprised of two field rasters on one CRT where one field shifted relative to the other to compensate for the film movement between fields. This system again was only good for 625/50 25fps systems. However Cintel came up with a version for 525/60 systems wherea 3:2 pulldown was required. This was achieved by using 5 different patches on the CRT to compensate for the different position of the film during each scanned field. As some of you who worked on these machines will remember, adjusting the geometry of the scan for each patch was a nightmare. Misalignment caused a sort of flicker twitch of the image between fields; relatively easy to adjust for two field positions but not for five!

Various machines are mentioned in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine