George Albert Smith (4 January 1864 – 17 May 1959) was an English stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, inventor and a key member of the loose association of early film pioneers dubbed the Brighton School by French film historian Georges Sadoul. He is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research, his short films from 1897 to 1903, which pioneered film editing and close-ups, and his development of the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor.

Biography

Birth and early life

Smith was born in Cripplegate, London in 1864. His father Charles Smith was a ticket-writer and artist. He moved with his family to Brighton, where his mother ran a boarding house on Grand Parade, following the death of his father.

It was in Brighton in the early 1880s that Smith first came to public attention touring the city's performance halls as a stage hypnotist. In 1882 he teamed up with Douglas Blackburn in an act at the Brighton Aquarium involving muscle reading, in which the blindfolded performer identifies objects selected by the audience, and second sight, in which the blindfolded performer finds objects hidden by his assistant somewhere in the theatre.

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) accepted Smith's claims that the act was genuine and after becoming a member of the society he was appointed private secretary to the Honorary Secretary Edmund Gurney from 1883 to 1888. In 1887, Gurney carried out a number of "hypnotic experiments" in Brighton, with Smith as his "hypnotiser", which in their day made Gurney an impressive figure to the British public.

Since then it has been heavily studied and critiqued by Trevor H. Hall in his study The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Hall concluded that Smith (using his stage abilities) faked the results that Gurney trusted in his research papers, and this may have led to Gurney's mysterious death from a narcotic overdose in June 1888. Following Gurney's death, his successors, F. W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, continued to employ Smith as their private secretary. In 1889, he co-authored (with Henry Sidgwick and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick) the paper, Experiments in Thought Transference, for the society's journal.

Blackburn publicly admitted fraud in 1908 and again in 1911, although Smith consistently denied it.

At St. Ann's Well Gardens

thumb|300px|right|Smith at work

In 1892, after leaving the SPR, he acquired the lease of the St. Ann's Well Gardens in Hove from the estate of financier and philanthropist Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, which he cultivated into a popular pleasure garden, where from 1894 he started staging public exhibitions of hot air ballooning, parachute jumps, a monkey house, a fortune teller, a hermit living in a cave and magic lantern shows of a series of dissolving views. Smith also began to present these dioramic lectures at the Brighton Aquarium, where he had first performed with Douglas Blackburn in 1882. Smith's skilful manipulation of the lantern, cutting between lenses (from slide to slide) to show changes in time, perspective and location necessary for story telling, would allow him to develop many of the skills he would later put to use as a pioneering film maker developing the grammar of film editing.

Smith had attended the Lumière programme in Leicester Square in March 1896 and spurred on by the films of Robert Paul, which played in Brighton for that summer season, he and local chemist James Williamson acquired a prototype cine cameras from local engineer Alfred Darling, who had begun to manufacture film equipment after carrying out repairs for Brighton-based film pioneer Esmé Collings. In 1897, with the technical assistance of Darling and chemicals purchased from Williamson, Smith turned the pump house into a film factory for developing and printing and developed into a successful commercial film processor as well as patenting a camera and projector system of his own. Both he and his neighbour Williamson would go on to become pioneering film makers in their own right creating numerous historic minute-long films.

Smith was granted a patent for the new process, which abandoned the three-colour approach of Edward Turner in favour of a two-colour (red-green) The process was first demonstrated on 1 May 1908, followed by further demonstrations in 1908 and public demonstration from early 1909 as far afield as Paris and New York, for which Smith was awarded a silver medal by the Royal Society of Arts.

In 1909 Urban founded the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, intended to commercially exploit the Kinemacolor process. Urban’s future wife, Ada Jones, purchased the Kinemacolor patent from Smith. This enabled Urban to sell Kinemacolor licenses all around the world. Smith felt he was cheated into selling his invention too cheaply, and Urban believed that Smith was selling secrets to rival inventors. However, Smith remained an employee of the Natural Color Kinematograph Company and testified on its behalf during the 1914 lawsuit by rival inventor William Friese-Greene, which challenged Smith's Kinemacolor patent. Smith's patent for the Kinemacolor process was revoked in 1915, after which it faded out of public view.

Later life and death

In the late 1940s he was rediscovered by the British film community, being made a Fellow of the British Film Academy in 1955. Hove Museum has a permanent display on Smith and Williamson.

Selected filmography

  • The Haunted Castle (1897)
  • Making Sausages (1897)
  • Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (1897)
  • The X-Rays (1897)
  • Hanging Out the Clothes (1897)
  • The Miller and the Sweep (1898)
  • Photographing a Ghost (1898)
  • Santa Claus (1898)
  • The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)
  • As Seen Through a Telescope (1900)
  • Grandma's Reading Glass (1900)
  • Grandma Threading her Needle (1900)
  • A Quick Shave and Brush-up (1900)
  • Spiders on a Web (1900)
  • The Old Maid's Valentine (1900)
  • The House That Jack Built (1900)
  • Let Me Dream Again (1900)
  • The Inexhaustible Cab (1901)
  • The Death of Poor Joe (1901)
  • Mary Jane's Mishap (1903)
  • The Sick Kitten (1903)
  • Tartans of Scottish Clans (1906)
  • Two Clowns (1906)
  • Woman Draped in Patterned Handkerchiefs (1908)
  • A Visit to the Seaside (1908)

References

Bibliography

  • Hall, Trevor H. (1964). The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Gerald Duckworth.
  • History of film industry in Brighton
  • History of Brighton that includes the claim that Smith invented the closeup
  • First Colour Moving Pictures Discovered: The First Colour Moving Pictures Made by Lee and Turner (Restored film video) September 2012.