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lO How Films Began
Blue Coat School, Clifton. He waf? very young whfin he became interested in photography, then at the l^cginning of its development. It was in 1882 that my father and John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, who had devised a projection lantern, which he called the Bio-Phantoscope, joined forces. Rudge incidentally was the first man to run an electrically-propelled boat (his own invention) up the River Avon, at Bath. In St. Michael's Cemetery, Bath, there is a tomb on Rudge's grave, with an inscription recording liis inventions , a tablet to the joint memory of Rudge and my father has been affixed to the wall near the house where Rudge lived in Bath. Rudge produced what he called " Life in the Lantern," using 4 by 5 inch glass plates, with an oscillating shutter, made of two leaves and opening and closing from the centre. As the shutter closed over one plate the next plate was advanced between the light and the lens, an<l this gave the illusion of animation.
It was this device that gave my father his first idea for motion photography. He made several improvements on Rudge's invention, and in 1885 gave an exhibition before the Photographic Society of Great Britain. Rudge, by this time, had died and my father had to continue his experiments alone.
Two years later my father had still further improved his lantern. He was a very successful photographer in Piccadilly, London. Further fame and notorietv came his way when he drew such large crowds to his studio by the exhibition of his " moving pictures " that the police compelled him to stop the exhibition.
I want you to notice that I stress the fact that he was a successful photographer. He had money then. But so keen was he on his invention that he had lost every penny and had actually been imprisoned for debt before he died dramatically while addressing a meeting of film men at the Connaught Rooms, London, on May 5, 1921.
The search for a suitable flexible material for negative and positive prints gave my father a great deal of anxiety. He realized that true motion picture photography could never be obtained satisfactorily with glass as a basic material. Then, in 1888, he found what he had been seeking. He devised a camera that enabled him to take pictures in series on strips of sensitized paper of a length as great as fifty feet. It was with this camera that he photographed a street scene at Brighton that gave him proof over an Edison claim in the United States courts more than twenty years later.
It was for this case that my father made his first and only visit to America in 1910. This action definitely proved that my father, and not Thomas A. Edison, first conceived and invented the cinematograph camera, and that it was also W. Friese-Grecne who first thought of linking sound and photographed action together.
WTien the case was heard in the United States Circuit Court, South District, in December, 1910, that street scene at Brighton was invaluable.
With a camera built for him by R. Chipperfield of Clerkenwell Green. London, my father was able to take photographs on a sensitized strip of paper, at the rate of seven or eight a second. But the problem was, when the reproduction of life motion was needed, how to prevent the paper from breaking.
A solution was found in celluloid, which had then begun to appear as a