Although his name is now sadly lost in the annals of history, Robert W. Paul once carved out a legacy for himself as Great Britain's foremost cinematic pioneer and earliest film producer. In retrospect, Paul represents turn-of-the-century Britain's foremost protégé of Thomas Alva Edison -- and although the men never officially worked together, their rosters of accomplishment closely mirror one another and intersect historically at several points.
Circa 1894, Edison and his business partner, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, inaugurated the premier era of motion picture art with the Kinetoscope, an exhibition device for feature films. Like its descendant, the modern projector, the Kinetoscope capitalized on persistence of vision by running a reel of perforated, developed film across a light source and thus sustaining the illusion of movement onscreen. The gentlemen patented the device and made a fortune off of it in the States. Not long after, Paul -- then an electrical engineer headquartered in London's Hatton Garden district -- received a visit from several Greek businessmen who sought to take advantage of the absence of patent on Edison's invention in the U.K. by hiring Paul to duplicate Edison's invention en masse. Paul immediately agreed, and built several Kinetoscopes -- selling them not only to the Greek clients in question, but to numerous other showmen across Great Britain. All of his clients, however, ran headfirst into a roadblock, given their inability (as unlicensed operators of an Edison invention) to acquire films to screen on the device.
To rectify this problem, Paul devised plans to assemble a British hybrid of two crude motion picture cameras: Edison's Kinetograph and a similar device developed and honed by the French inventor Étienne-Jules Marey, christened the Chronophotographe. Paul planned to then shoot his own films and supply them to clients. Paul teamed up with the British still photographer Birt Acres in February 1895, and the men emerged from their laboratory by March of that year with a prototype. They signed a contractual agreement to collaborate as producers for ten years, but experienced a bitter dispute and a permanent split when Acres apparently patented his own name, sans that of his partner, on a similar invention -- which naturally infuriated Paul.
With a rudimentary projector and camera under his belt (which he systematically improved over time via the addition of such implements as a "maltese cross" device to impart movement to the running film), Paul then transitioned from mechanical engineering and raw invention into the regular production of motion pictures. He mounted the first public demonstration of his latest projector ("The Theatrograph") at Finsbury Technical College on February 20, 1896. Meanwhile, Paul continued to produce films. Although Paul wrote to Edison and attempted to distribute several of his films to the American inventor, and Edison promptly declined, Edison screened at least two of the 1895 films shot by Paul and Acres during the first public exhibition of the Edison Vitascope in April 1896.
The preponderance of Paul's early films were documentary-like records of local events, such as the June 1896 Derby at Epsom, England (won by the prince of Wales' steed, Persimmon) and Queen Victoria's "Diamond Jubilee" in 1897. Paul, however, quickly segued into fiction efforts, and in 1898 built England's first film studio, at Muswell Hill in North London. He reportedly shot an estimated 80 films during the summer of 1898 alone. One of Paul's key contributions involved the development of rudimentary "special effects." Paul built his studio into a frenzy, and hit his peak output during the years 1900-1905, but thereafter, he grew disinterested with film production and essentially retired from that business. Key titles produced by Paul's studio include The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901), The Magic Sword (1902), Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), and Buy Your Own Cherries (1904), among dozens of others.
Though it seems impossible, several of Paul's shorts, like those of the Lumières and Méliès, have withstood the ravages of time, and a compilation of the surviving works appeared on DVD for the first time, in Great Britain, circa late 2006.