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William Friese-Greene
George Davison. (Hon. Secretary of the Camera Club.)
1892 (ca)
Woodburytype
National Science and Media Museum
The Royal Photographic Society Collection, Inventory no: 2003-5001/2/22860
LL/51606
George Davison (1855 - 1930) was a Civil Servant who began work at Exchequer and Audit Office in Somerset House in 1874. He took up photography about 1885, became a member of the RPS and soon elected to its executive council. Davison became deeply involved in the contemporary artistic debates about photography. He was a noted pictorial photographer and a founder member of The Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1892. From 1897 Davison was assistant manager of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company, renamed Kodak Limited in 1898. He became managing director in 1900.
By early 1888 William Friese-Greene (1855 - 1921) 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.
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