[2] In 1871, he was apprenticed to the Bristol photographer Marcus Guttenberg,[3] but later successfully went to court to be freed early from the indentures of his seven-year apprenticeship.

[6] Rudge built what he called the Biophantic Lantern, which could display seven photographic slides in rapid succession, producing the illusion of movement.

[9] Moving his base to London in 1885, Friese-Greene realised that glass plates would never be a practical medium for continuously capturing life as it happens.

On 18 February, Friese-Greene sent details of the camera to Thomas Edison, whose laboratory had begun developing a motion picture system, with a peephole viewer, later christened the Kinetoscope.

Initially working with William Norman Lascelles Davidson, Friese-Greene patented a two-colour moving picture system using prisms in 1905.

Although the projection of prints did provide an impression of colour, it suffered from red and green fringing when the subject was in rapid motion, as did the more popular and famous system, Kinemacolor.

Urban was granted an injunction against Biocolour in 1912, but the Sussex-based, racing driver Selwyn Edge funded an appeal to the High Court.

[19][20] These were featured in a BBC series The Lost World of Friese-Greene and then issued in a digitally restored form by the BFI on DVD in 2006.

[19] On 5 May 1921, Friese-Greene – then a largely forgotten figure – attended a stormy meeting of the cinema trade at the Connaught Rooms in London.

[21] Given his dramatic death in poverty (his pockets contained only one shilling and ten pence when he died), surrounded by film industry representatives who had almost entirely forgotten about his role in motion pictures, there was a spasm of collective shock and guilt.

In 1951 a biopic was made, starring Robert Donat, based on the biography, Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor,[16] as part of the Festival of Britain.

In 1955, Kodak employee Brian Coe wrote an article in the British Journal of Photography called "The Truth About Friese Greene" in reaction against the biography and the film, which expressed the view that Friese-Greene had not made any contribution to the development of the motion picture.

[8] Friese-Greene was from then on more or less banished to obscurity by film historians, but newer research is rehabilitating him, giving a better understanding of his achievements and influence on the technical development of cinema.

They bear a plaque in a 1924 design by Eric Gill commemorating Friese-Greene's achievements, wrongly stating that it is the place where he invented cinematography.

Other plaques include the 1930s Odeon Cinema in Kings Road, Chelsea, London, with its iconic façade, which carries high upon it a large sculpted head-and-shoulders medallion of "William Friese-Greene" and his years of birth and death.

[36] The British Film Institute then worked on a new version, using post-production techniques to reduce the problems of flickering and colour fringing around moving objects, which Kinemacolor and this process had when projected.