Well, that's what the IMDb trivia for this short film says, although they call him a 'fantasist'. That's certainly far more polite.
I really don't have any opinion on the issue. The valuable site "Who's Who of Victorian Cinema" talks 'round Robin Hood's barn, about improvements in magic-lantern technology, and "a sequence camera using 'a roll of any convenient length of sensitised paper or the like', capable of taking four or five pictures a second.". Sounds like a motion picture camera to me. Then there's this film, and the claim that it's.... well, who knows? They're all dead.
I do know that Thomas Edison was in the habit of suing people who denied his genius and that's why we think he invented the light bulb and not an Englishman named Swann. I'm not sure any one individual invented the motion pictures. A bunch of inventors and tinkerers came up with bits and bobs that by about 1900 looked pretty much like the machine used for about ahundred years to make movies. Friese-Greene seems to have done a lot of work in the early 1890s. Throw his hat in the ring.
I really don't have any opinion on the issue. The valuable site "Who's Who of Victorian Cinema" talks 'round Robin Hood's barn, about improvements in magic-lantern technology, and "a sequence camera using 'a roll of any convenient length of sensitised paper or the like', capable of taking four or five pictures a second.". Sounds like a motion picture camera to me. Then there's this film, and the claim that it's.... well, who knows? They're all dead.
I do know that Thomas Edison was in the habit of suing people who denied his genius and that's why we think he invented the light bulb and not an Englishman named Swann. I'm not sure any one individual invented the motion pictures. A bunch of inventors and tinkerers came up with bits and bobs that by about 1900 looked pretty much like the machine used for about ahundred years to make movies. Friese-Greene seems to have done a lot of work in the early 1890s. Throw his hat in the ring.
