435
ventors saw the machinery of the industrial revolution,
specifi cally the wool-combing machines jointly devised
by their fathers, as a legacy that could evolve into a
mechanism of the communications revolution—the mo-
tion picture camera—ensuring their fi nancial security,
and perhaps even useful in promoting their extreme
libertarian views.
It was a unique camera mechanism, which again had
more in common with textile machinery than with other
photographic devices. A shuttle carrying the fi lm moved
upwards as the fi lm itself was pulled down, resulting
in the fi lm being stationary relative to the lens during
each exposure. Development was entrusted to Crofts,
a member of the Camera Club which met in central
London, and it was perhaps at a Club lecture that he
became aware of Eastman celluloid roll fi lm. The new
medium was ideal for their camera. Some time between
late 1889 and early 1891, Donisthorpe and Crofts set
up their kinesigraph in a building overlooking London’s
Trafalgar Square, and shot at least one short fi lm. It is
an evocative, multi-layered view. Foaming water from
one of the famous fountains is framed against a sooty
background of the domed National Gallery building.
Its colonnaded frontage is background to the bustling
traffi c of pedestrians and horse-drawn omnibuses, the
latter bearing bold advertisements for cocoa. Closer,
two carriages clip on their way, beneath the triple glass
globes of an elaborate gas street lamp. A sequence of
nine frames survives in the collection of the National
Museum of Photogaphy, Film & Television at Bradford,
and a single frame from the same sequence is in the
Cinémathèque Française collection.
Donisthorpe and Crofts were among the fi rst ex-
perimenters to take photographic sequence pictures
with a single-lens camera using a fl exible photographic
medium. Others included physiological analyst Etienne-
Jules Marey, cinema visionary Le Prince, and portrait
photographer William Friese-Greene. In America, Wil-
liam Kennedy-Laurie Dickson was working on experi-
ments that would culminate in the Edison kinetoscope.
Attempts to solve problems with the Donisthorpe and
Crofts projector mechanism continued for months at
least, but were unresolvable. Public presentation of their
fi lms eluded them. In the meantime, the perforated fi lms
of the Edison team had proved a success in a peep-show
viewing machine. An arcade featuring Edison kineto-
scopes, the fi rst device to commercially exploit motion
picture fi lms, opened in London’s Regent Street on 17
October 1894. In November W.C. Crofts died, and any
hope that might have remained for the eventual success
of the kinesigraph project died with him.
Donisthorpe continued his involvement in fringe
politics, and wrote books on weights and measures and
the poll tax. In his 1898 travel yarn Down the Stream
of Civilization—an account of a yachting trip with his
chess friend George Newnes (whose company published
the book) and two other cronies—an increasingly melan-
choly Donisthorpe wrote: “Being unable to retrace our
steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space.
Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of
Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old
faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesig-
raph are perfected, and some future worker has solved
the problem of colour photography, our descendants will
be able to deceive themselves with something very like
it: but it will be but a barren husk: a soulless phantasm
and nothing more. ‘Oh for the touch of a vanished hand,
and the sound of a voice that is still!’”
Donisthorpe later assisted his sons in experiments
with color and sound motion pictures. His fi nal book
Uropa, A New Language was published in 1913.
Stephen HerbertBiography
Born in Leeds, 24 March 1847. Father George Ed-
mund Donisthorpe, mother Elizabeth Wordsworth.
Attended Leeds school, and in 1865 was admitted to
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Maths
Wrangler and successful at billiards. Visited battle-
fi elds of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Married
Annie Maria Anderson, 1873. In 1876 his fi rst book,
Principles of Plutology was published. 1882 founded,
with his cousin William Carr Crofts and others, the
Liberty and Property Defence League, to promote
their Individualist ideas. In 1885 he helped found the
British Chess Association, and the British Chess Club.
From 1870s experiments with a camera featuring fast-
changing glass plates, the invention of photographic
moving images was a recurring ambition. With Crofts,
in 1889 he patented and had built a fi lm camera. A se-
quence of Trafalgar Square indicates some success, but
they failed to make their projector work. Donisthorpe
died at Hindhead, Surrey, on 30 January 1914.
See also: Friese-Greene, William; Edison, Thomas
Alva; Le Prince, Augustin; Dickson, William
Kennedy-Laurie; and Marey, Etienne Jules.Further Reading
Herbert, Stephen, Industry, Liberty, and a Vision: Wordsworth
Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph, London: The Projection Box
1998.DONNÉ, ALFRED (1801–1878)
French photographer and physicianIn Théodore Maurisset’s caricature of early daguerreo-
types, the French physician, Aldred Donné, is believed