William Friese-Greene 1855 - 1921

By early 1888 Friese-Greene had designed his first camera for taking a series of photographs on a flexible base. He 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.