George Albert Smith (January 4, 1864 – May 17, 1959) was a stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, inventor, and a key member of the loose association of early British film pioneers dubbed the Brighton School by French film historian Georges Sadoul. He is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research, his short films from 1897 to 1903, which pioneered film editing and close-ups, and his development of the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor. Smith was born in Cripplegate, London in 1864. His father Charles Smith was a ticket-writer and artist. He moved with his family to Brighton, where his mother ran a boarding house on Grand Parade, following the death of his father. It was in Brighton in the early 1880s that Smith first came to public attention touring the city's performance halls as a stage hypnotist. In 1882 he teamed up with Douglas Blackburn in an act at the Brighton Aquarium involving muscle-reading, in which the blindfolded performer identifies objects selected by the audience, and second sight, in which the blindfolded performer finds objects hidden by his assistant somewhere in the theatre. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) accepted Smith's claims that the act was genuine and after becoming a member of the Society he was appointed private secretary to the Honorary Secretary Edmund Gurney from 1883 to 1888. In 1887, Gurney carried out a number of "hypnotic experiments" in Brighton, with Smith as his "hypnotizer", which in their day made Gurney an impressive figure to the British public. Since then it has been heavily studied and critiqued by Trevor H. Hall in his study The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Hall concluded that Smith (using his stage abilities) faked the results that Gurney trusted in his research papers, and this may have led to Gurney's mysterious death from a narcotic overdose in June 1888. Following Gurney's death, his successors, F. W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, continued to employ Smith as their private secretary. In 1889, he co-authored (with Henry Sidgwick and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick) the paper, Experiments in Thought Transference, for the Society's journal. Blackburn publicly admitted fraud in 1908 and again in 1911, although Smith consistently denied it. In 1904, A.H. Tee took over the lease on St Ann's Well Gardens, and Smith moved to a new home in Southwick, Sussex, dubbed Laboratory Lodge, where with finance from Charles Urban, he went on to develop the Lee-Turner Process, which had been acquired by Urban following the death of Edward Raymond Turner in 1903, into the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor. Smith proved the new process, which abandoned the three-colour approach of Edward Turner in favour of a two-colour (red-green) process, with early test films such as Tartans of Scottish Clans (1906) and Woman Draped in Patterned Handkerchiefs (1908) before giving a trade demonstration of A Visit to the Seaside (1908) on 1 May 1908, followed by public demonstration from early 1909 as far afield as Paris and New York, for which Smith was awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Society of Arts. In 1910 Urban founded the Natural Colour Kinemacolor Company, which successfully used the process to produce over 100 short features at its studios in Hove and Nice, until it was put out of business by a 1914 patent suit filed by William Friese-Greene, which ended Smith's film career. In the late 1940s was rediscovered by the British film community, being made a Fellow of the British Film Academy in 1955. Smith died in Brighton on 17 May 1959. Hove Museum has a permanent display on Smith and Williamson. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• published: 28 Aug 2015
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