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William Friese-Greene, pioneer (from the DMB) .....

William Friese-Greene (1855-1921), developer of moving pictures and photographer, was born as William Edward Green on 7 September 1855 at 68 College Street, Bristol, one of seven children of James Green (b. 1816), a metalworker and goldsmith, and his wife, Elizabeth Sage (b. 1816). He entered Queen Elizabeth's Hospital school, Brandon Hill, Bristol, at the age of ten, leaving on his fourteenth birthday. He was apprenticed to a local photographer, Maurice Guttenberg, and developed a special skill for portrait photography. At the age of eighteen, in 1874, he left to run his own studio. That same year he married Victoria Mariana Helena Friese (d. 1895)-a Swiss woman whose name he joined to his own. Two years later they had their only child, Ethel Adelaide. Friese-Greene enjoyed a high reputation as a photographer, opening two shops in Bristol, one in Plymouth and two in Bath-the family's new home.

It was in Bath that Friese-Greene met John Arthur Roebuck Rudge (1837-1903), an instrument maker and inventor who had devised several adaptations of the magic lantern which created an illusion of movement by showing a number of photographic plates in quick succession. Friese-Greene assisted him in this work and demonstrated the machines. It undoubtedly inspired him to try to develop more fluid moving pictures. In 1885 he moved to London where he opened six studios and had a laboratory. He subsequently studied science at the Regent Street Polytechnic and joined a number of learned societies.

By early 1888 Friese-Greene had designed his first camera for taking a series of photographs on a flexible base, which at that time was paper film. Friese-Greene then had a second camera built with two lenses for stereoscopic filming. He next teamed up with Mortimer Evans, a civil engineer, to improve on these designs. They claimed their patent 10,131 (provisionally registered on 21 June 1889 and accepted in May 1890) could take ten pictures a second, but the speed is likely to have been slower. It did, however, incorporate many of the mechanical essentials for a moving picture camera. The first film successfully taken and projected with the new apparatus was supposedly of a scene at Hyde Park Corner in October 1889; it was first publicly exhibited at Chester town hall in July 1890 (DNB). However, some film historians now dispute this testimony, arguing that such projection would not have been possible.

A few months later Eastman celluloid film became available in this country and Friese-Greene immediately used it for filming. With Frederick Varley he further improved on the camera designs and demonstrated these new models at photographic societies. Meanwhile, Friese-Greene was trying various means of showing these images. A number of his contemporaries have testified to seeing him project films off a strip of transparencies about 1890.

Friese-Greene spent the considerable profits from his studios on inventing and in the process neglected his business affairs to such an extent that he was sued for debt and imprisoned in 1891. The following year he was declared bankrupt. None the less, he made some money from his patents for high-speed printing of photographs for cigarette cards and publications.

By 1895 the beginnings of commercial moving pictures were happening in Europe, but they were led by Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, and Robert Paul rather than Friese-Greene, who had been largely forgotten. He nevertheless persisted with his printing ideas, and registered a patent for photographic typesetting and a system for printing without ink. His wife had been of poor health for some time and died that year. He remarried in 1897. His second wife was Edith Harrison (d. 1921); they had six sons, one of whom died in infancy.

From the late 1890s Friese-Greene started to focus on creating moving pictures in colour. By 1905 he had a working system in which successive images were taken through alternating filters (for example, red and blue-green), with the printed frames then being dyed these colours. If projected at sufficient speed, they created an impression of colour. By this time he and his family were living in Brighton.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Friese-Greene's patented ideas included the electrical transmission of images (inspired by a meeting with Guglielmo Marconi), a chemically driven engine, and a gyroscopically controlled airship (which according to his sons was sold to the German government). By 1910 Friese-Greene was bankrupt again, but ironically he was called to New York to testify to his prior invention in a case which broke the Edison monopoly on film production and distribution. On returning he found himself in a prolonged court battle with Charles Urban over their rival colour processes. Friese-Greene won, but it was Urban's Kinemacolor that made all the money.

The onset of the First World War stopped all colour developments. Friese-Greene and his family were by this time in such a state of poverty that a friend organized a collection for them from the film industry. It was too much for his wife, who left him in 1917. Friese-Greene worked for the government during the war and afterwards returned with vigour to his ideas for colour cinematography. New companies were formed that successfully exploited his patents, though without benefit to him. On 5 May 1921 Friese-Greene attended a major meeting of film distributors, at the Connaught Rooms, 61-3 Great Queen Street, London, where he stood up and made a speech in which he wondered what a film of his life might be like and whether it would tell the truth. He died a few minutes later. In his purse was 1s. 10d.-apparently all the money he had. His wife survived him, but died later the same year.

The film industry gave Friese-Greene a big funeral and commissioned a monument by Sir Edwin Lutyens for his grave in Highgate cemetery, where he was buried on 13 May 1921. His tombstone was inscribed with the words 'the inventor of Kinematography', as well as patent number 10,131. A film about his life was produced by the film industry for the Festival of Britain: this was The Magic Box (1951), directed by John Boulting, and was a fitting tribute. He was one of the few to point the way ahead for the film industry, and he inspired Edison's workers in their crucial research. As an inventor he was often ahead of his time. His son Claude Friese-Greene (1898-1943) continued to develop his colour process, using it to make a series of films of a car journey from Land's End to John o' Groats. Titled The Open Road, the series was distributed in 1926 for promotional purposes, but never achieved commercial success. A restored version was televised in 2006.

by Peter Carpenter

Sources R. Allister [M. Forth], Friese-Greene, close up of an inventor (1948) + B. Coe, 'William Friese-Greene and the origins of cinematography', Screen, 10/2 (March-April 1969), 25-41 + B. Coe, 'William Friese-Greene and the origins of cinematography', Screen, 10/3 (May-June 1969), 72-83 + B. Coe, 'William Friese-Greene and the origins of cinematography', Screen, 10/4 (July-Oct 1969), 129-47 + W. Friese-Greene, Moving Picture News, 3/49 (3 Dec 1910) [court affidavit] + private information (2004) + G. H. Friese-Greene, 'William Friese-Greene: the beginnings of cinematography', The Elizabethan [magazine of Queen Elizabeth's School, Bristol] (July 1947) + E. Rudge, 'John Arthur Roebuck Rudge', The Bath Critic (Jan 1953) + W. E. L. Day, Twenty-five thousand years to trap a shadow, unpublished MS, Cinematheque Francaise, Paris [chapters on Friese-Greene and Rudge] + B. R. Davis, 'William Friese-Greene', The Elizabethan [magazine of Queen Elizabeth's School, Bristol] (March 1947) + G. Hendricks, The Edison motion picture myth (1961), 173-180 + H. V. Hopwood, Living pictures: their history, photo-production, and practical working (1899); repr. (New York, 1970) + DNB + b. cert. + d. cert. + m. cert. + +

Archives Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, France, Will Day MSS + National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, Bradford, Yorkshire FILM BFI NFTVA + Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, France

Likenesses W. Friese-Greene, self-portrait, photograph, c.1890, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford

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