Laurie Dickson (1860-1935), a young British inventor, developed some of the first machines for capturing and projecting moving images. His unique contributions to the development of motion pictures included a sprocket mechanism that could expose a strip of film at regular intervals, as well as an early experiment in combining moving images with sound. Dickson founded his own motion picture studio and launched the careers of early cinema actors and directors such as Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Lillian Gish.

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was born to English parents in Minihic-sur-Ranse, France on March 16, 1860. At the age of nineteen he was fatherless, and living in London. Dickson read an article about the American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, who had recently unveiled his most remarkable invention-the electric lightbulb. Edison was already famous for having invented the phonograph, a machine for recording sound. Dickson, an amateur...