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Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures

The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath — political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera — and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures.

Nearly forgotten today, Wordsworth Donisthorpe accomplished many remarkable things in his life: he patented a moving picture camera, helped revive the British Chess Association, wrote prolifically on libertarian politics, and even invented a language. Donisthorpe’s patent consisted of six paragraphs of explanation but no diagram and no real description of how the plates would move, although he later wrote that they would be “pressed forward by a constant spring and struck down one after the other at a rate of eight per second by a mechanism worked by a revolving handle”. In place of the expected phrases of language learning, we find translations of idiosyncratic sentences such as “Charles has given me a refrigerator” — rendered as Karla avyrie ma glacyrusam — as well as “I hate purple walls” and “The rabbit which has fallen from the rock was dead”.

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