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Jan 1889 - Friese-Greene Films Hyde Park
Undeterred by his unsuccessful attempt to form a partnership with Thomas Edison, William Friese-Greene moved on to form a working relationship with John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, an inventor of magic lanterns. Rudge had invented a lantern called a Biophantic Lantern (which would be renamed the ‘Phantascope’). The Phantascope displayed seven slides in quick succession by means of a Maltese Cross mechanism, giving the illusion of movement. An enthusiastic advocate of the Phantascope, Friese-Greene curiously neglected to mention Rudge’s involvement when he demonstrated the lantern to the Photographic Society in 1887, claiming it was an invention that “he had designed”. And on 27th January 1889, when Friese-Greene demonstrated a new version of the Phantascope that used twin lanterns projecting slides alternately, Rudge was peeved enough to publicly bring attention to the fact that he, and not Friese-Greene, was the machine’s inventor.
So fascinated was Friese-Greene by the concept that he set to work on devising his own camera – one that would record movement. One Sunday morning in January 1889, Friese-Greene set up his newly-invented camera – a box approximately one foot square with a side-handle – on a tripod to the west of Aspley Gate in London’s Hyde Park and exposed roughly 20 feet of film. Friese-Greene filmed “leisurely pedestrians, open-topped buses and hansom cabs with trotting horses”.
In June 1889, Friese-Greene applied for – and later received – a patent (No. 10,131) for his single lens ‘chronophotographic’ camera, (“an Improved Apparatus for taking Photographs in Rapid Series”) which was reputedly capable of recording ten photographs per second on newly-invented celluloid film. Unfortunately for Friese-Greene, the invention of his camera had left him bankrupt, and he was forced to sell the rights to his patent for £500. However, the first renewal fee was never paid and the patent lapsed in 1894. By then, Friese-Greene – whose somewhat disorganised nature probably cost him a higher status in the history of moving pictures – had begun experimenting with sound and colour film. [ADD]
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