The Scotsman - Scotsman Magazine - Adventures in motion pictures

IN A converted Edinburgh warehouse a young dancer spins her way round a computer screen, flashing a glimpse of thigh with each flick of her skirt. Shs followed by an older dancer with a more sophisticated routine and a hoop dress. As the rings of fabric rotate like living, abstract art, the dress slips, psychedelically, from yellow to red to pink to green to blue to purple. The film might only be 20 seconds long but is mesmerising. Is also over a hundred years old.

Restored and now computerised, these haunting images were rescued from a tatty old strip of celluloid which was bought in a flea market in Sydney in the late 1970s and then stored, forgotten about, in the collector's Highland attic. But a few years ago, when the owner finally retrieved the reel, he noticed the name Edison printed beside the fils date, 1897, and realised that he'd been sitting on a fragment of film-making history.

It might have been prolific inventor Thomas Edison's idea to create a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" but, as head of the project, it was his Scottish protégé, William Dickson, who actually developed a machine that could record and replay movement. The film now flickering on that Edinburgh screen was one of Dickson's original reels.

Thanks to Edisom's skill at using the expertise of others to claim fame for himself, William Dickson has disappeared from the minds of all but a few film buffs. But his is an extraordinary story of scientific derring-do...

An fascinating article. For even more information than the article and to view the clip of the dancer, visit http://www.edisonfilm.co.uk