Price £20.00 (£15.00 to MLS members)
Stephen Herbert, Industry, Liberty, and a Vision: Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph [revised edition]
Hastings: The Projection Box, 2017
ISBN 978-1903000-15-1
226 pages, 92 illustrations, hardback, 21.5 x 26.5cm
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.
After publishing the first edition of this book in 1998, Stephen Herbert and Mo Heard continued their research, unearthing a great deal of new material on their subjects, not least from the rich digitised newspaper resources that became available in the early 21st century. Together with family scrapbooks and other material from Donisthorpe’s descendants, the result is this vastly expanded and beautifully produced second edition, including 30 additional illustrations and more information on the Donisthorpe, Croft and their developments of moving picture technology.
We also have a few copies of the original 1998 edition of this book.