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Title
Materials relating to the nature films and photography of (Frank) Percy Smith
Reference
URB/8
Production date
1908 - 1946

Creator

Urban, Charles Biography Biography
Charles Urban, film producer, was born on 15 April 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the second eldest of the ten children of Joseph Urban, a sign painter, and his wife, Anna Sophie (1846–1887), daughter of Heinrich Glatz of Königsberg and his wife, Pauline. His parents were part of the German community in Cincinnati. Urban went to school until fifteen, after which he worked in stationary shops before becoming a successful book agent. In 1889, Urban moved to Detroit, where he opened a stationary shop. During this time he became interested in Edison phonographs. In 1895 he became manager of a phonograph and Kinetoscope parlour. In 1896 Urban acquired the agency rights to the Edison Vitascope film projector for Michigan, and soon joined Edison film agents Maguire and Baucus of New York. By August 1897 he was in London as manager of Maguire and Baucus in Britain, controlling Edison's European interests. In London, Maguire and Baucus renamed itself the Warwick Trading Company, a name that became renowned for its reliable product and emphasis on actuality, news, and travel film. Warwick cameramen were soon travelling the globe to bring moving images to audiences new to this world of wonders. In 1903, Urban broke away to form the Charles Urban Trading Company. Urban became a figurehead for the British film industry. In 1901 inventor Edward Turner interested him in a potential three-colour cinematography system. Initial results were unsatisfactory, and shortly afterwards Turner died, but Urban acquired the patent rights and set his associate George Albert Smith to work on the project. After futile experiments with three colour filters, in 1906 Smith discovered that a two-colour system would reproduce most of the spectrum adequately, and Kinemacolor was invented, the first natural colour film process. Urban gave the first demonstration of Kinemacolor in May 1908. Kinemacolor became Urban's greatest triumph. However, the downturn in Urban's fortunes had begun. In December 1913 a legal challenge to the Kinemacolor patent was launched by William Friese-Greene, anxious to promote his own Biocolour system. The petition was dismissed, but reversed on appeal in March 1914. Urban had lost his precious, and ultimately indefensible, monopoly on colour films. Urban became a naturalized British citizen in 1907. He was married twice, first to Julia Lamereux Avery on 20 December 1888; the marriage ended in divorce in 1908. On 22 February 1910 he married Ada Aline Jones, née Gorecki (1868–1937). Urban adopted her daughter from her previous marriage, Anna Marguerite. He had no children of his own. With the outbreak of war, Urban used his persuasive powers to interest British officialdom in the propagandist power of the cinema, and in late 1915 produced Britain Prepared, a documentary feature on Britain's military strength, made for the Wellington House cinema committee. Urban was then sent to the USA to promote this and other British war films. After returning briefly to Britain in the summer of 1916 to edit the masterly documentary feature The Battle of the Somme, Urban moved his business interests to the USA, where he worked with an engineer called Henry Joy on an improved colour system, to be called Kinekrom, and continued to promote British propaganda films in the USA. This latter activity yielded mixed results, causing some embarrassment to his British masters when Urban made an ill-judged approach to the Hearst press (which was widely seen to support the German cause), but he continued to handle British war films in the USA to the end of the war, and edited a propaganda newsreel, Official War Review. Urban sought to expand his activities in the USA after the war, and conceived of a hugely ambitious scheme to bring all his various activities and huge film library together under one roof at Stanford White's imposing Cosmopolitan Magazine Building in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, which he renamed the Urban Institute. While enthusiastically launching his plan in 1922 for a kind of audio-visual encyclopaedia, Urban was blind to the fact that a library of largely outdated short interest films would never find the necessary bookings to support such an ambitious venture, and it all collapsed into bankruptcy in 1924. Around 1930 Urban returned to Britain. He continued for a while to pursue chimerical further fortunes, but in 1937 he donated all of his papers to the Science Museum, and the following year retired to Brighton. He died on 29 August 1942, in a Brighton-based nursing home.

Scope and Content
This series contains materials relating to the work of Frank Percy Smith (known most commonly as Percy Smith). Smith was a film-maker and naturalist who worked for Charles Urban in the early 20th century. He was a pioneer of early nature documentary film making and produced films in Urban's Kinemacolour film system. This series includes a number of bound volumes containing press cuttings, programmes and correspondence about and relating to Percy Smith's work. There is also a large amount of nature photography including animal, plant and mineral specimens.
Extent
Eight bound volumes and two A4 files of loose papers
Physical description
The volumes are bound in leather and manufactured textures. The materials have been glued onto cardboard and paper pages, sometimes with handwritten annotations in ink. The bindings on these volumes are fragile, and in one case has started to come apart from the volume. There are also a number of loose materials in two acid free folders which are more yellowed and brittle.
Language
English
Level of description
SERIES
Repository name
National Science and Media Museum, Bradford

Associated people and organisations

Smith, Frank Percy Biography Biography
(Frank) Percy Smith was born on 12 January 1880 at 15 Elizabeth Terrace, Islington, the son of Francis David Smith, a printer, and his wife, Ada Blaker. In childhood he became fascinated with animal and plant life. To please his family, however, at the age of sixteen he became a clerk with the Board of Education. The work was hatefully tedious to him, but it did allow him time to pursue his hobby with ever greater attention. He turned naturally to photographing his subjects, and it was a photograph of a bluebottle's tongue that attracted the attention of film producer Charles Urban. Urban aimed to bring documentary and educational film subjects to the general public, and encouraged Smith to repeat some of the close-up studies he had made on film. On 3 June 1907 Smith married Kate Louise (b. 1880/81), daughter of James Ustonson, an optician. Smith's wife was the only assistant he would allow when working. There were no children. Smith's initial experiments were followed up by more professional work conducted at home, which Urban started to exhibit in London theatres. Scenes of a fly performing such feats as juggling a cork, in The Balancing Bluebottle, astonished and delighted the public, and aroused considerable newspaper interest. Having gained no response from the Board of Education to his proposals for using film as an educational medium, Smith joined Urban as a full-time film-maker in 1910. He set up his self-made apparatus in his Southgate home and began to specialize in the filming of accelerated plant growth, using stop-motion photography, using the hour-wheel of a clock to trigger an electrical circuit to expose a single frame of film, and raising the camera by degrees as the plant subject grew. Such work was always preceded by meticulous research to determine the growth rate, and some films could be a year in preparation before a single frame was exposed. The first of the plant films, The Birth of a Flower, was issued in the Kinemacolor colour film process in 1911. Smith made over fifty nature films for the Urban Science series shown at the Scala Theatre, including several employing microscopy, before the outbreak of the First World War, when he first turned to the production of novel animated war maps. Smith then joined the navy, where he was made a sergeant of kinematography and photographed aeronautical and balloon experiments, as well as the surrender of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. After the war, with Urban now in America, Smith was lucky to find another imaginative producer in H. Bruce Woolfe of British Instructional Films. Smith began work on Woolfe's Secrets of Nature in 1922, an enduringly famous series of short documentaries that were popular in cinemas and festivals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and were for a long time acclaimed as the very best of British film production. Their simple yet meticulous observation engrossed all who saw them, and they became a mainstay of the non-theatrical educational film circuit for many years. He was especially involved in underwater photography and micro-cinematography. Smith wrote The Secrets of Nature (1939) and other guides to the subjects of his scientific films with educationist and film-maker Mary Field, a long-time associate. Percy Smith was an exceedingly private man. His work was initially viewed with some scepticism by the scientific community, which simply doubted the evidence of Smith's films, for they not infrequently overturned long-held assumptions about animal activity. But his methods were impeccable, and from the 1920s onwards his work was widely recognized for its originality and rigour, and he collaborated with such eminent scientists as biologist Dr Julian Huxley and botanist Dr E. J. Salisbury. He died on 24 March 1945 at 107 Chase Road, Southgate, after gassing himself. The coroner's certificate recorded that Smith killed himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed.

Subject
Cinema
Conditions governing access
Access is given in accordance with the NMeM access policy. Material from this collection is available to researchers through the NMeM's Insight facility.
Conditions governing Reproduction
Copies may be supplied of items in the collection, provided that the copying process used does not damage the item or is not detrimental to its preservation. Copies will be supplied in accordance with the NMeM's terms and conditions for the supply and reproduction of copies, and the provisions of any relevant copyright legislation.