Friese-Greene, William (1855–1921)

English photographer, inventor, and early experimenter in cinematography.

Friese-Greene was born in Bristol. Around 1875 he opened a portrait photography studio in Bath, moving to London in 1885. Asked to produce slides for a magic lantern (forerunner of the slide projector), he became interested in moving pictures, and in 1889 patented a camera that could take ten photographs per second on a roll of sensitized paper. Using his own apparatus, he was able to project a jerky picture of people and horse-drawn vehicles moving past Hyde Park Corner – probably the first time an actual event had been projected on a screen. In 1890, he substituted celluloid film for the paper in the camera, and in the next few years he patented other inventions: a three-colour camera, moving pictures using a two-colour process, and machinery for rapid photographic processing and printing.

Although Friese-Greene's patent of 1890 was upheld in the USA in 1910, the first functional cine camera is generally credited to French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) in 1888.