Price £7.50 (£5.00 to MLS members)
Stephen Herbert, Industry, Liberty, and a Vision: Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph [first edition]
London: The Projection Box, 1998
ISBN 978-0952394-13-6
120 pages, 49 illustrations, paperback, 15 x 21cm
From his first experiments in the 1870s with fast changing glass plates, and his suggestion of a talking picture of W.E. Gladstone, the invention of photographic moving images was a lifelong ambition of individualist Wordsworth Donisthorpe.
With his associate William Carr Crofts, Donisthorpe patented and built a film camera, and in 1890 they successfully shot a sequence of traffic in Trafalgar Square – probably the first film of London, a fragment of which still exists – but, tragically, they failed to make their projector work.
This book links Donisthorpe and Croft’s technology with earlier mechanisms of the industrial revolution, considers their motivation, and places the moving picture experiments of these two political activists in context with the better-known work of Le Prince, Friese Greene, Marey, and Edison.
We also have a few copies of the 2017 revised and expanded edition of this book.