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— afterwards King Edward VII — came over and talked to us when we were getting the show ready in this kind of small anteroom. He seemed to speak with a fairly strong German accent. But I do not remember being greatly impressed with the pictures. Probably I was a bit excited too, and was thinking far more of keeping the light burning properly than of looking to see what the pictures were like. One of them did startle me, though: it was a picture of a great wave rushing into the mouth of a cave and breaking into clouds of spray.
Looking back, it seems very curious to me that a subject to which I was destined to dedicate all my future life should make so littie first impression on me. I suppose I was so obsessed with the behaviour of the arc-lamp that I paid no real attention to the pictures: yet at that very early date they must have been 'a dainty dish to set before a king.' It is true that Friese Greene had had many ideas and at least one master-patent before that time but I cannot learn that he ever actually produced anything to which that poetic description could be applied.
Some twelve years later when I read that the brothers Wright in America had actually lifted off the ground in a flying machine I was intensely excited, though that had no effect upon my future life except for one little incident. My father had some time previously bequeathed to me the writing of the science notes for a monthly journal and I reported, perhaps glowingly, this most important adventure as it seemed to me. The editor asked me to discontinue the column. He may have thought that 'flying' — till then unheard of — was too fanciful and flippant for a staid and solemn journal, or it may have been only that my work generally was not up to his standard. I shall never know; but I got the sack from that job.
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