In his lifetime, Leeds-born Wordsworth Donisthorpe patented a motion-picture camera, helped found the British Chess Association, wrote prolifically on libertarian politics and even invented a language.
The great What If will tell the story of Donisthorpe’s strange, one-of-a-kind camera, which was based, extraordinarily, on the flax spinning machines in the Leeds mills of his father, George Edmund Donisthorpe. It will look at a film sequence shot by Donisthorpe in 1889, just weeks after another inventor, Louis Le Prince, shot his own sequences in Leeds as well as Donisthorpe’s last-ditch efforts to fund his experiments by attempting to blackmail one of Bradford’s most respected industrialists.
A forgotten pioneer, Donisthorpe’s story will be presented by local historian, Irfan Shah, along with revelatory new material, as we pose the question: would the history of cinema have been different if Wordsworth Donisthorpe had been better at blackmail?
The talk will be given in the wonderful cinema of the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University and introduced by Professor Robert Shail.
Details and register here: https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/events/heritage-open-days/hod-wordsworth-donisthorpe-and-the-great-what-if/
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