William Friese-Greene

He died a few minutes after giving a speech to a meeting of film distributors at the Connaught Rooms, Great Queen Street, London. It is reported that he had, in his pocket, 1s. 10d. (one shilling and tenpence), which was all the money he owned; after the First World War he and his family were poverty stricken, and his wife had left him in 1917.

His work in film was overtaken by that of his European neighbours, led by Thomas Edison , Robert Paul, 'Auguste Lumiere' and 'Louis Lumiere' and much of his pioneering work had been forgotten. he continued with his printing ideas, however, and registered a patent for photographic typesetting and a system for printing without ink, around 1895.

With much of his money spent inventing new film processes he neglected his business affairs - in 1891 he was imprisoned after being sued for debt.

A pioneer of colour film processes, which he began to work on in the late 1890s. This work led to a call to testify in New York in 1910 in a case which broke the edison monopoly on film production and distribution. He was subsequently engaged in a prolonged court battle with Charles Urban over their rival colour processes - he won the court case bu Urban's Kinemacolor was more financially successful.

By early 1888 Friese-Greene had designed his first camera which was capable of taking a series of photographs on paper film. This was based on work done with the inventor John Roebuck Rudge in Bath. His second camera was built with two lenses for stereoscopic filming. Shortly afterwards he registered a patent for his camera, with a civil engineer, Mortimer Evans, and claimed that it could take ten pictures a second - this has been disputed, but reportedly the first film taken with the camera was a scene at Hyde Park Corner in London, October 1889 which was subsequently exhibited at Chester Town Hall in July 1890. This testimony, however, has been disputed by some who believe it would not have been possible at this time to project such a 'moving picture'.