An intriguing posthumous footnote to Robert Paul’s career appeared in 1952, in the form of an advertisement for the Reed Paper Group. No doubt aiming to liven up the subject of paper making, Reed had their illustrator Roy Carnon work up a scene that supposedly coincided Albert E Reed starting his paper business near Maidstone. Reed, we’re told, was ‘one of the purposeful men who made the 1890s a period of promise unique in our history’ – just like Robert W. Paul.
In Carnon’s vivid illustration, seen in Punch and other popular periodicals, a remarkably convincing Paul is seen projecting ‘strange new pictures on a magic lantern screen’ in his Hatton Garden workshop. The audience of three or four viewers aren’t in anything like period dress – they look more 1952 than 1895 – through the image on the screen, of a horse-drawn bus and kerbside shoeshine, tries harder to look Victorian. But the machine Paul cranks is accurately modelled on Paul’s Theatrograph projector of 1896.
Questions abound… Who had the bright idea of choosing Paul as Reed’s ‘purposeful’ contemporary? Paul had been dead for nearly ten years, and was largely ignored in the tide of enthusiasm which followed Muriel Forth’s book about William Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor, and the film that would canonise him as Britain’s forgotten film pioneer, The Magic Box. This all-star tribute was on national release when the Reed advertisement appeared in 1952, and it makes no mention of Paul.
We now know that the film’s climactic scene, when Robert Donat’s Friese-Greene demonstrates his projector to a sceptical policeman, was in fact a fictionalised version of a scene that did happen in 1895, when Paul and Acres produced their first film, made to run on a Kinetoscope, and their jubilation attracted police attention in Hatton Garden. And Paul would go on to create the projector seen in Carnon’s illustration, sometime between December 1895 and January, in time to demonstrate it at Finsbury Technical College on 20 February.
Could Carnon have seen the projector that Paul had donated to the South Kensington museum, when the ground floor of what is now the Science Museum housed a Science display as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951? He would certainly have known about the promotion of Friese-Greene, then at its height, but the advertisement makes no mention of this. Instead it accurately pin-points Robert Paul as the true pioneer, even if it backdates his success by a year.
And there’s more to this illustration and its creators than just nailing the ‘origin’ story more accurately than anyone else in 1952. Just over a decade later, Roy Carnon would paint one of the most famous images of science fiction cinema, as a sketch artist for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: the iconic double-wheel circular space station. Thereafter he would contribute to many more sci-fi and fantasy films of the 60s and 70s, including Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars IV: Return of the Jedi. For more on Carnon’s career in cinema, see https://www.2001italia.it/2013/10/the-art-of-roy-carnon.html For more on Paul’s early career and Science Museum holdings, see https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/robert-paul
Paul's Animatograph Works 