XVI
FIRST STEPS
In the United States, England, France and Germany efforts are made to project motion pictures on the screen—Half successes, whole failures, bitter disappointments and yet—perennial hope to harness magic shadows.
During the period between the time Edison achieved his first success with motion pictures, in 1889, until his peep-show viewing machines were put on public display in New York, Paris and London in 1894, hesitant, unsteady steps, like those of a baby learning to walk, were being taken in advancing the magic shadow art-science.
Progress was made in England under Wordsworth Donisthorpe, an interesting character named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, three associates, Greene, Rudge and Evans, and others. In France, there were Marey and Demeny, with Marey developing what was probably the first real motion picture projector capable of projecting more than one short scene—the limitation of all disk models though it was only intended for laboratory use; and Reynaud with the first popular motion picture theatre which, however, did not use photographic pictures. In Germany, Anschütz, inventor of the Tachyscope, was working on a projector, as were others on both sides of the Atlantic.
Donisthorpe, with the help of W. C. Croft, whom he later described as “a good draughtsman” but not a person skilled in optics, constructed about 1889 a Kinesigraph which Donisthorpe had originally suggested in 1877, at the time he wrote concerning Edison’s phonograph and a plan to combine it with a motion picture machine. Describing the circumstances in a letter to the British Journal of Photography of March 12, 1897, Donisthorpe said: “I agreed to give him (Croft) an interest in my invention for drawing and supervising construction of the instrument, as I was at that time busy with other work.” He noted that Croft had never claimed to be its inventor. As the reader will recall, Donisthorpe had named his idea, the Kinesigraph, twelve years before this arrangement with Croft.
Donisthorpe and Croft obtained a British patent in 1889 but that expired when not renewed after four years. Donisthorpe complained that an adverse report of some alleged experts killed his plan when he attempted to obtain financing from Sir George Newnes, who might have been the film’s first patron. Newnes had made his fortune as a newspaper and magazine owner. He invested a large sum in the Norwegian South Pole expedition of 1898 but was dissuaded from backing motion pictures. Donisthorpe’s idea was called “wild, visionary and ridiculous and that the only result of attempting to photograph motion would be an indescribable blur.”
“I shall ask in the future,” Donisthorpe continued, “to give me all I shall ever get in return for my time and thought, namely, the credit of having been the first to invent, and the first to patent the Kinesigraph, the photography of motion.” He also noted that as a barrister he would not care to defend the monopoly of any patentee after 1889. But he was never called upon for that, for in England, as elsewhere, the motion picture patent situation eventually became a hopeless muddle.
In the March 26, 1897 issue of the same publication, the British Journal of Photography, Donisthorpe also commented on his Kinesigraph: “The instrument was patented, made and worked before any other saw the light. I do not pretend the results were in all respects satisfactory. What first machine ever is?” Donisthorpe expressed surprise that some had not attempted to copy his machine which operated with a single moving lens and took pictures two and one-half inches in diameter on sensitized paper. This was later made transparent by the application of petroleum jelly or castor oil, a process which Eastman had used, for still pictures, with paper roll film in the United States from 1884 until his film base was developed late in 1889. Donisthorpe held that the continuous action with the moving lens providing the necessary intermittency was a decided advantage over other types: “In one particular, my own invention is so vastly superior even now to all that have come after it, that I am surprised practical men have not adopted it, now that it is open to the English public to do so.” As interesting as Donisthorpe’s idea was even in 1877 and also in 1889, it is very unlikely that his machine was satisfactory. Even now the intermittent motion picture camera and projector hold practical supremacy except in the case of very high speed photography for scientific purposes.
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842–1890), who worked in England, the United States and France, was the son of a French officer who was a friend of Daguerre, the pioneer in photography. Le Prince became a photographer, under the influence of Daguerre and in 1870 went to work in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, where he had his own shop. From shortly after 1880 to 1889 he was in the United States, returning then to Leeds.
Le Prince proposed a multiple-lens camera-projector system. On January 10, 1888 he applied for an American patent, which was issued on November 16 of the same year, on a “Method of an apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life.” In Le Prince’s method, two strips of sensitized paper or other material would be fed alternately through a camera and projector equipped with two sets of rotating lenses. It has been said that Le Prince also had an idea of a system using only one lens.