W.K. Laurie Dickson

I have started reading a book called the Film 100. Basically it is a list of what it is believed to be the 100 most influential people in the film industry. In the foreword the author even talked about how hard it was to narrow it down to 100 people.

But anyway the first guy was W.K. Laurie Dickson. Apparently, he was the real brains behind "moving pictures" not Edison. Edison, the book, said was not really interested in figuring out the science of moving pictures, he thought that eventually we would just run out of interesting images.....

But Dickson just kept pressing Edison to fund expirements for cameras. All the technical stuff that went into it was kinda over my head, but basically he had a problem of figuring out materials flexible enough to be rotated or something like that.

Intrestingly enough the person that helped Dickson make a significant breakthrough was a Episcopalian minister. He had "perfected a way of applying photographic elusion to a roll of film" (Smith, pg. 4)

I still need to research that to find out what exactly that means but I love studying early film history, I'm not sure why. It's just so cool!!

Check this out guys! One of the earliest "Movies" People thought that this train wasn't going to stop and that it would hit him.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=early+moving+pictures%2C+train&aq=f