Leon Forrest Douglass (March 12, 1869 – September 7, 1940) was an American inventor and co-founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company who registered approximately fifty patents, mostly for film and sound recording techniques.

Benson, president of the Nebraska Phonograph Co., who hired him as the company’s agent for the western part of the state.

[2] One business opportunity that Douglass was unable to bring to fruition was a contract to exhibit Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope at the World’s Fair.

[2] In August 1900, after a brief period working in Philadelphia for the Berliner Gramophone Co., which was closed by a legal action, Douglass agreed to go into business with Eldridge R. Johnson, who owned a machine shop in Camden, New Jersey and had supplied machines to Berliner.

[4] In fall 1906, a few months after the birth of his son Eldridge, Douglass had a nervous breakdown followed by other health problems and became unable to work.

It starred Ruth Roland, with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks making guest appearances.

In March 1921 The Talking Machine World stated: In 1921 Douglass moved his family to Menlo Park, California, where he bought a 52-room reinforced concrete mansion that had been built by Theodore Payne, a San Francisco hardware manufacturer.

During his years there, he also patented zoom lenses; the first anamorphic lens for undistorted wide-angle film photography; and devices for special effects such as appearing and disappearing ghosts, shrinking one actor in a scene, and the illusion of flames surrounding an actor.

He had a window cut in the wall of the pool at Victoria Manor through which he filmed people swimming beneath the surface, usually his daughters Ena and Florence.

[4][6] In 1932, at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institution, Douglass participated in a scientific expedition off Easter Island, where he filmed at depths up to 1,500 feet using his submarine cameras and also an underwater "flashlight" that he also patented.

In the mid-1930s he participated in a classified US Navy operation filming the ocean floor near Pearl Harbor and other strategic sites in Hawaii.