Years later, at the trial of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company against Thomas A. Edison, a model of the Le Prince camera-projector was introduced together with results purportedly made by Joe Mason of Biograph, but it was unsatisfactory—the double lens system did not produce evenly spaced pictures and each had to be printed separately. Furthermore, the background had to be treated specially or the figures would appear to jump right and left, because each lens took pictures from a slightly different angle.
Le Prince disappeared in 1890 when he was visiting in France prior to returning to the United States, some investigators have asserted, to show a perfected model of his projector-camera. The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved.
John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, an optician and instrument maker of Bath, England, had developed about 1866 the Bio-Phantoscope, an application of the Plateau magic-disk. He maintained a continuing interest in photography.
About 1882 William Friese Greene (1855–1921), a young man who was a friend of the English photographer Talbot, came into contact with Rudge. In 1885 Greene opened a camera shop in London. A few years later he demonstrated before the Photographic Society a little projection instrument made by Rudge which showed four pictures in rapid succession as, for example, the change of an expression from grave to gay, or a face in the act of blushing. That device was considerably more primitive than the projector first invented by Uchatius, long before Greene was born.
In May of 1890 Rudge showed at a meeting of the Bath Photographic Society a new optical lantern fitted with a mechanism which aimed to represent, by means of a series of photographic slides, men and animals moving as in life. That device, an improvement of the earlier Rudge projector, had one condenser to gather the light and four small projection lenses. Greene suggested the addition of the coloring effects by coating parts of the slides with pigments.
However, the machine was described as unfinished, though in the Photographic News of May 30th it was stated, “The effects were, from an entertainment point of view, vastly superior to those produced by Mr. Muybridge and others by the application of the Thaumatrope principle, the unpleasant jerkiness of which is well known.” But it was stated that Rudge’s machine had several serious defects. The pictures were small and limited to only a few in number. Greene also had a model and gave a demonstration in London which seemed to impress only a Mr. Chang of the Chinese Embassy, one of the invited guests.
The Greene-Rudge or Rudge-Greene machine was partially the work of Mortimer Evans, a civil engineer, with whom Greene made contact in 1889. That year they applied jointly for a patent on a film device. The same year Evans sold out his interest for a reported £1,200 and Greene was in financial troubles.
The Greene-Rudge-Evans device was a box film camera which, it was claimed, could be converted into a projector. By this time celluloid film was available in England as well as in the United States and France. According to the February 28, 1890, Photographic News, the camera could take ten photographs a second. The Greene camera, measuring eight by nine by nine-and-a-quarter inches, could take 300 pictures, and a smaller model turned out by Evans, 100 pictures. The reviewer of 1890 wrote, “the object of it is to obtain consecutive pictures of things in motion which can afterwards be rapidly consecutively projected on a screen so as to reproduce, say, a street scene, with the horses, human beings, and other things moving as in nature.” Greene this same year claimed that his machine camera would have important military uses. In this he was farsighted, as the modern motion picture camera is an important instrument of military reconnaissance, record and instruction as World War II has so amply demonstrated.
In the British Journal of Photography for December 5, 1895, A. T. Story defended Greene’s priority of invention and claimed that Greene’s projection apparatus of 1889–90 was a success. That conclusion is not inescapable. There appears no concrete evidence that Greene-Rudge-Evans achieved screen projection, for it is obvious that had they done so it would have been widely acclaimed at the time. But they did make a camera and attempted a projector. The camera apparently was practical. Marey and others in France, Anschütz in Germany, Edison, and Wallace Goold Levison in Brooklyn and W. N. Jennings of the U. S. Weather Bureau in Chicago, among others, were making successful motion picture films at that time. Projection remained the great problem.
In 1893 Greene obtained a patent on a device related to the Chronophotographe developed by John Varley, a member of the English landscape painting family. His projection idea included a loop formed by means of intermittent pressure on the film passing before the lens. Greene’s November 29, 1893, patent application, accepted exactly one year later, was “to produce by means of reflected light artificial scenery to take the place of the ordinary scenery or background.” It included “improvements in apparatus for exhibiting panoramic, dissolving or changing views and in the manufacture of slides for the use thereof.” From this it is clear that even as late as 1893 Greene’s idea was limited in scope and effectiveness. At this time Greene made some pictures in Hyde Park with a large portable camera.