Shining the spotlight on former Dovercourt resident and prolific inventor: William Friese-Greene
Here at The Electric Palace we’re delving a little into the complex history of the moving image, inspired by the fact that we have our own sliver of early cinema history right up the road, in Dovercourt!
Later this year we’ll be working with the Harwich Festival of the Arts, following their successful application to the Essex 2020 Year of Science & Creativity legacy project, to present a series of events inspired by the work of inventor and early film pioneer William Friese-Greene.
The man in the photograph above ought perhaps to be better known, he was a key figure in the early development of cinematography in Britain. While Lumière and Edison are practically household names, there were several other people in the race to be the first to capture life on film and it’s interesting to us at the Electric Palace, as one of the earliest cinemas ever built, that one of them actually lived in our town.
William Friese-Greene was born in 1855 in Bristol, where he trained to become a portrait photographer. He was talented in the art of photography and he was a successful businessman too: photography studios bearing his name opened up in Bath, Plymouth, Brighton and London as his reputation grew. He came to live in Dovercourt on Cliff Road in 1897, in a house that is now marked by a Harwich Society plaque in the front garden. He would live here until 1904.
In the 1880s and 1890s, William Friese-Greene, like many others, had fervently pursued a dream of using photographic technology to represent real life, in motion, on a screen. He was involved in the creation of at least three distinct moving picture cameras between 1889 and 1891.
The invention of movie cameras was a very competitive affair and history is usually told by the winners. William Friese-Greene’s inventions belong to a particular period in history that was known for rapid innovation, experiments, exhibitons and patents. However, according to author Raymond Spottiswoode, the story of who created the first moving images is about sixty-five years long!
“the cinema was the product of many minds, often working independently along the same lines in different countries.” — Raymond Spottiswoode
It all began with the invention of something called a Phenakistiscope, a paper disc which has drawings on one side and slots through which you can glimpse them in a mirror. If you spin the disc and look into the mirror through the slots in the disc, the drawn figures appear to move:
The invention of the Phenakistiscope established the basic principles for creating the illusion of movement and these were taken up by other inventors. Soon it was photographs rather than drawings that were being used to animate a subject, the subject might be a horse, a bird or a human being.
The fusion of a series of still images into one seemingly continuous movement is a ‘trick’ that works on the human eye, it makes us believe that what we are seeing actually is movement. This is the basis of all moving image technologies, even today. To perform this trick, the images must be of identical size and evenly spaced, they must move forward within the projector at an appropriate speed and a shutter has to obscure the film while it is in motion. Cinema projectors of all kinds still have these basic characteristics.
As a pioneer of the moving image, William Friese-Greene grasped this concept but he struggled to realise it with the materials that he had at his disposal and the money available to him to produce prototypes and register patents. From the late 1880s, new inventions in the field of motion pictures started to arrive thick and fast.
In this article published in Sight and Sound last month, Peter Domankiewicz has summarised the most imporatnt advances made during this period. He challenges the popularly held belief thet it was the Lumière brothers who ‘invented’ cinema. The article also includes a single frame from one of Friese-Greene’s rare films.
As a result of the introduction of cameras that could be used to take multiple exposures came the development of new types of film to use in them. Portrait photography had previously relied on individual glass plates for a single image, but capturing a rapid succession of images called for a thin, flexible strip on which the light-sensitive emulsion could be applied so that it could be wound through a camera taking a quick succesion of images. Friese-Greene worked on this problem as well, but at the same time he was also busy developing new processes for the rapid printing of cards, experimenting with x-ray photography and making explosives! His businesses often suffered as a result the time he devoted to his experiments in cinematography and his other inventions.
During his lifetime William Friese-Greene registered a great many patents, including one in 1889 for an ‘apparatus for taking photographs in rapid series’ and he went on to patent an early two-colour filming process in 1905. This proves that, despite the difficulties he faced, he was still working on new inventions and innovations while he was living here in Dovercourt.
It was during the First World War where it seems that he finally succumbed to poverty, he and his wife separated during the war and he would sadly die in 1921 a pauper. It would take decades before people paid much attention to him and his work.
Later this year there will be a series of events in Harwich and Dovercourt that will examine William Friese-Greene’s legacy and the contributions he made to the science of film and film making. These are part of the legacy programme of Essex 2020, the county’s biggest ever celebration of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM).
We’ll be working with The Harwich Festival, The National Science and Media Museum and other local partners. Our work is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England.
We’ll release more information about the programme soon, but we’re pleased to announce that researcher and film maker Peter Domankiewicz, who has written extensively about William Friese-Greene, will be presenting his research in a public talk. If you’d like to find out more, the link to his blog about William Friese-Greene is here: https://friesegreene.com/
