More than coincidence?

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson left the employ of Thomas Edison in 1895, having established the 35mm film standards that persist to this day. He was already involved in a partnership that became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company for which be became a travelling cameraman, in due course coming to England in May 1897. It was known that he had filmed in Worthing on the Sussex coast. So having recently published a book about film-making in the more important film centre of Brighton & Hove, I thought it might be worth checking out more about Dickson’s time in Worthing. The results were meagre. It seems he spent only a couple of days in the town, filming the swimming club, among other things.

However, the search threw up one snippet worth noting, although at the moment for nothing more than mere curiosity. In trying to find out why he was not present in the 1911 British census (conducted on 2 April), it turns out he sailed from Liverpool to New York on the White Star liner Baltic on 25 March 1911. My eye was caught by the name two lines above his in the passenger list: Mr Eugene Lauste. He had also worked for Edison, between 1886 and 1892 and with Dickson had  developed the Latham loop, about which patent battles were to be fought, used in the wide-film system  known as the Eidoloscope. Not long before that transatlantic crossing Lauste had achieved a practical sound-on-film recording, something he had been working on for several years.

Maybe their journeying together to America had no greater significance than two old colleagues travelling together. Maybe…

TTFN