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from the hours when I was working — I was taking care of an office in Dashwood House in the City for a Dutchman named Noppen, who was trying to sell reflex cameras, I think he had something else on his mind that took up very much more of his attention than did his business. I had come upon him when I was trying to sell advertising space for the Photographic News. One morning, early, I found him anxiously scratching round London searching for someone to take his place while he went back to Holland 'on business.5 I stood by him, as a fellow should when another is in distress, and I never left him until late in the evening he engaged me at thirty shillings a week, to look after things in his absence. Those business trips to Holland took place with increasing frequency and then one day he never came back. I sold the cameras as well as I could and paid the rent and my salary out of the proceeds, and when that source came to an end, I closed the office and went home.
Well, now I must either sink or swim. Either I must be prepared to invest my poor savings or hang on to them and look for another job. Investment was decided upon and my young cousin, Monty Wicks, agreed to come in with me for a small wage and the lark of the thing. Early in 1897, we t0°k a shop in Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, and set up there to work an agency we secured for the sale of cameras and dry-plates. We enjoyed the lark and waited for custom — which never came.
I was still being bitten by the thought of those film pictures of Robert Paul's, and it was at some time during the first months at Cecil Court that I discovered the possibility of buying an experimental film-projector from a man named Bonn in High Holborn. I bought it for a pound, modified it and coupled it to my existing lantern, and thus I had a means of projecting films.
A kinematograph projector is in essence nothing but an ordinary optical or magic lantern with a mechanism fitted in front in place of the slide carrier. The film in fact takes the place of the slide and the mechanism is merely a contraption to pull it through the optical system intermittently and at sufficient speed. Just in case this should come to the notice of anyone who does not already know it, that speed is one foot or sixteen 'frames' a second for silent films. It is faster still for sound pictures.
The mechanism I bought from Bonn was just this movement complete with its objective lens. I made a simple alteration to my lantern, fitting its objective lens (for the slides) into a sliding
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