Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS 117 Friese-Green Friese-Green : Ray AUister. tions, 1948). 12s. 6d. {Mar stand Publlca friese-green fits straight into the English mythology of science. He is the mad inventor immortalized in ephemeral children's magazines of the late nineteenth century He borrowed something from Captain Nemo and the other Jules Verne scientist who proposed to shoot the ice cap off the North Pole with a gigantic cannon. but accidentally rubbed the noughts off a calculation on his blackboard and missed. He may have lent something to Professor Challenger, for Conan Doyle and Friese-Green may have been neighbours in Brighton. Friese-Green was an individualist, anarchic, unbusinesslike, vague. To these qualities he added genius, enthusiasm and a disregard of the ordinary conventions of living and love. He helped to make other men's fortunes. He fell dead at the age of 66 at a joint meeting of the KRS and CEA under the chairmanship of Lord Beaverbrook on May 5, 1921, with only the price of a cinema seat in his pocket. The industry which had coined millions, but had allowed the man who had contributed so much to them to die virtually of starvation, erected a monument by Lutyens, which ran: WILLIAM FRIESE-GREEN. THE INVENTOR OF KINEMATOGRAPHY. HIS GENIUS BESTOWED UPON HUMANITY THE BOON OF COMMERCIAL CINEMATOGRAPHY OF WHICH HE WAS THE FIRST INVENTOR AND PATENTEE. Ray Allister's book studies the evidence for priority of invention of the film camera and projector (as opposed to the moving picture), and proves pretty conclusively that the honour PHOTOMICROGRAPHY (A Section of Realist Film Unit Ltd.) Producer: Dorothy Grayson, B.Sc. 9 GREAT CHAPEL STREET, W.I Gerrard 1958 FIRST CATCH YOUR GRUB .... We have had a good deal of experience one way and another, and we would rather deal with small flora and fauna at Wraysbury than at Great Chapel Street. For one thing, they are easier to find in the country and, for processes such as time-lapse photomicrography ax high magnification, we like the country peace and quiet and absence of vibration. LABORATORIES AT WRAYSBURY for CINEBIOLOGY MICROMANIPULATION COLOUR and TIME-LAPSE CINEMICROGRAPHY belongs to Friese-Green. By 1888 he had recorded a series of consecutive photographs of movement on oily paper. By some time in January 1889. he had managed to make sensitized celluloid. He had also designed a camera anda projector. His first successful film was projected to a passing policeman in January 1889. He filed a provisional specification with the Patent Office on June 21, 1889. The completed specification was accepted on May 10, 1890. With the exception of sprockets, which Friese-Green had temporally abandoned, the principles of his camera were the fundamental ones from which the camera of today has been developed. In June 1889, Friese-Green wrote to Edison, proposing to associate his camera with Edison's phonograph in order to make talking pictures. The letter was acknowledged by Edison's laboratory, but not by Edison himself. A full description of the camera was requested. FrieseGreene sent it. There was no reply, but Edison patented his film camera, the Kinetoscope, in 1891 in America. The patent was not taken out in England, because it could not claim 'novelty' over Friese-Green's earlier patent. In 1910 Edison made an affidavit he had never seen the Friese-Green letters, yet from 1891 to this day Edison has usually been given the sole credit for the invention. Indeed, Friese-Green muddled away the proceeds of his own work, and Edison's drive, combined with the Lumiere projector of 1894, laid the foundations of the film industry. It was the Lumiere show at the Polytechnic in 1896 which first awoke the imagination of the public. Though Mr Allister's book is readable and authoritative he has managed to conceal good scholarship under an irritating, diffuse and sometimes slipshod style and presentation. Ikseems to belong to the school that believes invention to be the isolated and unpredictable product of individual genius. Yet most modern historians agree that inventors are sensitive vehicles, expressing and synthesizing the collective scientific experience of their time. Had the author taken this point of view, his book would have been no less readable, but more profound, and Friese-Green might have appeared as an even greater figure. His motives and character might have b er to understand. Mi AUister interpolates imaginary conversations, which makes his book seem arch and unreal. He says in his foreword: 'This true Storj 's written in a wav that I have sometimes thought intolerable in other biographies. It reports conversations al which the author could not pOSSiblj have been present, these conversations appeal in this book because, as Scenes were described to me b> members of I riese-Green's familv and In his old colleagues and friends, thej set themselves in mv mind m dialog ( I