William Friese-Greene (1855–1921) was born William Edward Green but took on the surname of his first wife, Helena Friese (1850–1895) after they married in 1874. Born into a working-class family in Bristol, he found success as a photographer in Bath from 1876, gradually turning his name into a brand for a chain of studios in the West of England, before moving to London in 1885 and repeating his success there. An innovator in commercial photographic products and with a gift for marketing, Friese-Greene was very active within the Photographic Society of Great Britain, while pouring a lot of the income from his businesses into invention. In Bath, he had known and worked with John Rudge (1837–1903), who created various devices to project an illusion of movement from posed photographs. In London, Friese-Greene began to take the idea further – to capture live action, first on glass, then sheets of film and eventually roll film.

On June 21 1889, Friese-Greene applied for British patent 10,131 with Mortimer Evans (1836–1921), an English civil and mining engineer, based in Glasgow, with a strong interest in electrical matters who had no known previous experience in photography, but who may have met Friese-Greene through the British Association or one of the other scientific organisations they were both active in (Domankiewicz, 2024). Their patent was described as ‘Taking Photographs in a Rapid Series with a Single Camera and Lens’, thus defining itself as distinct from the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Ottomar Anschütz, or the patent of Louis Le Prince.

From June through to September the firm of A. Légé & Co. in Hatton Garden, London constructed a camera for Friese-Greene, but this camera was not the same as the one in the patent. It was larger, was geared to take pictures more rapidly, and the film travelled downwards, rather than upwards. A smaller, ‘Kodak size’ camera to the pattern of the patent may have been made later and this ‘improvement’ appeared to be connected with Evans (Domankiewicz, 2024).

Friese-Greene took possession of the larger camera on September 26, 1889 and generally referred to it as a “Machine Camera”. He soon bought out Evans’ share of the invention but, apart from a couple of premature disclosures in the press, it remained under wraps until the domestic and foreign patents had been dealt with (Anon., 1889; Friese-Greene, 1889). On February 25,1890, Friese-Greene showed the camera to the Bath Photographic Society and displayed strips of film shot with it (Friese-Greene, 1890). That week it was extensively described and illustrated in The Photographic News, a report that then appeared in Scientific American in April (Anon., 1890a & 1890c). It would also be written about in France and Germany (David & Charles, 1892). Friese-Greene claimed a speed of ten frames per second with his camera, which was theoretically achievable, as it exposed four frames with a single turn of the handle (Brown, 1909a). 

This was the very first camera to be publicly disclosed for taking a rapid series of photographs on a roll of film with the aim of synthesizing and reproducing motion – Le Prince having worked in secret, Edison’s work unseen at that time and Marey being interested only in the analysis of movement via short strips of film. 

In September 1889, only paper negative, or stripping film was commercially available in rolls in Britain, but the first samples of Eastman Transparent Film arrived in the UK in November 1889 and it went on sale in January 1890. It is therefore likely that Friese-Greene initially used paper film. 

Friese-Greene stated that the first film he shot was of traffic at Hyde Park Corner, but this film is lost, as are most of the test films he made. All that remains are a short celluloid sequence taken on the path beside the Serpentine at a slow frame rate, a print of a short piece of film reproduced in Kinematograph Weekly in 1909, taken in a London street, and a recently unearthed frame of negative. Friese-Greene was working on a lantern/projector in 1890 and one was constructed for him by Légé and Co in the first half of the year. His plan was to project images with it at the Photographic Convention at Chester in June 1890. However, in the event, the projector was not working, so he showed the camera, displayed a long strip of film of people walking on Haverstock Hill, north London, and showed a sequence of a hand opening and closing using a box device with a 3-ft (0.9m), built-in screen (Watkins, 1933). 

Friese-Greene would continue experimenting with moving pictures through the early 1890s and then patent new equipment in 1896 as the film industry took off, continuing to invent throughout the rest of his life, particularly in the field of colour cinematography.