During the period between the time Edison achieved his first success with motion pictures, in 1889, until his peep-show viewing machines were put on public display in New York, Paris and London in 1894, hesitant, unsteady steps, like those of a baby learning to walk, were being taken in advancing the magic shadow art-science. Progress was made in England under Wordsworth Donisthorpe, an interesting character named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, three associates, Greene, Rudge and Evans, and others. In France, there were Marey and Demeny, with Marey developing what was probably the first real motion picture projector capable of projecting more than one short scene--the limitation of all disk models though it was only intended for laboratory use; and Reynaud with the first popular motion picture theatre which, however, did not use photographic pictures. In Germany, Anschütz, inventor of the Tachyscope, was working on a projector, as were others on both sides of the Atlantic. Donisthorpe, with the help of W. C. Croft, whom he later described as “a good draughtsman” but not a person skilled in optics, constructed about 1889 a Kinesigraph which Donisthorpe had originally suggested in 1877, at the time he wrote concerning Edison’s phonograph and a plan to combine it with a motion picture machine. Describing the circumstances in a letter to the British _Journal of Photography_ of March 12, 1897, Donisthorpe said: “I agreed to give him (Croft) an interest in my invention for drawing and supervising construction of the instrument, as I was at that time busy with other work.” He noted that Croft had never claimed to be its inventor. As the reader will recall, Donisthorpe had named his idea, the Kinesigraph, twelve years before this arrangement with Croft. Donisthorpe and Croft obtained a British patent in 1889 but that expired when not renewed after four years. Donisthorpe complained that an adverse report of some alleged experts killed his plan when he attempted to obtain financing from Sir George Newnes, who might have been the film’s first patron. Newnes had made his fortune as a newspaper and magazine owner. He invested a large sum in the Norwegian South Pole expedition of 1898 but was dissuaded from backing motion pictures. Donisthorpe’s idea was called “wild, visionary and ridiculous and that the only result of attempting to photograph motion would be an indescribable blur.” “I shall ask in the future,” Donisthorpe continued, “to give me all I shall ever get in return for my time and thought, namely, the credit of having been the first to invent, and the first to patent the Kinesigraph, the photography of motion.” He also noted that as a barrister he would not care to defend the monopoly of any patentee after 1889. But he was never called upon for that, for in England, as elsewhere, the motion picture patent situation eventually became a hopeless muddle.