You might be amused to know that I was gravely asked if I was willing to pass on my computations on the lenses. Me, computing something! So I said I was no lens designer and the guy I’m to see tomorrow is also no lens designer, so maybe we’ll get along all right. Let us hope so. They seem to like this very much, but M-------- says they’re concealing their enthusiasm. Anyhow, they want (a) an engineering estimate on what it will cost to turn out and (b) an idea of the market. They asked if I would write a sort of presentation to be sent to some of their markets for a reaction. I said: “If you read a description of what this thing does, would you believe it?” The idea of a presentation was dropped.
Nobody would.
Opposite: Diagram of Front Projection. Diagram from the original submission for Front Projection Patent #2727427: (a) is a camera, (b) a projector, and (c) a glass plate, (d) is a screen of reflex material, (e) is an actor casting a shadow which does not show as the camera looks down on the line of projected light, (f ) is light thrown on the glass plate which is not reflected to the screen and is thrown away.
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By the early sixties, there was a lot of activity in front projection and Will described the latest events in a letter to Jo-an on November 17, 1962, as follows: Here’s the dope on the Front Projection stuff. I assume that you want a reasonably complete outline.
I was doing some science fiction TV shows for CBS and the director moaned over the cost of scenery. I thought it would be interesting to try to solve it.
Rear projection is standard stuff. One hangs up a sheet of translucent material, projects a picture on it from the back, the actors stand in front of it and are separately lighted, every effort being made to keep the lights on the actors from striking the sheet. This isn’t too good.
I devised the idea of combining Scotchlight material (technically a “reflex reflector” which returns all light to its source instead of reflecting it away either diffusely or at an angle on the principle that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence.) I used a reflex screen such as is used on highway road signs to be lighted by one’s car headlights. The Scotchlite manufacturers claim that it is more than two hundred times as bright as white paint. And, close beside the source of the light, this is true. The light goes from the light-source to the Scotchlite screen as an expanding cone. Natural imperfections cause some scattering (which is useful in a highway sign) but most of the light does go exactly back to the light.
I take a projector and aim it across — at right angle — to the line of sight of a camera. I put a partly silvered glass plate so that it reflects some of the light to a reflex screen. Most of it goes through the glass plate and is wasted. But most of the light reaching the screen is returned to its source (in this case the partly silvered glass) and some of it is returned to the projector, but a great deal passes through.
Technically, at a specific position behind the glass plate, one looks (or a camera does) down the optical axis of the projection. This means that if an actor stands in the projection, he masks his own shadow. The point is, of course, that the screen is effectively two hundred times as bright as white paper, or an actor, so that the projected image falling on the actor is invisible while the background is visible. Then one throws more light on the actor from set lamps, to make him bright enough to photograph against the bright set.
CBS tested it. They set up a 9 × 12 foot screen of Scotchlite and a 9 × 12 foot rear-projection screen with a 2,000-watt arc-lamp projector. I used a 350-watt 35 mm home projector Identical slides were made for both projectors. They were set up so that a black and white TV camera had only to swing from one to the other.
It was found that the front projection image was superior in quality and so much brighter that we had to stop down the home-projector image to f 8 to make the images comparable. Using a rheostat to dim it, the two images were about equal when 55 volts was going to the home projector (with 110 volts it gave 360 watts of light) and it was still brighter but was changing color rapidly.
CBS drew up a contract to get the use of the device, but a research man from Minnesota Mining went into the office and Witlig (CBS Special Effects) showed him the gadget. My patent applications were in, but were still pending. The MM and M man said he didn’t think I could get a patent. It was too simple.
CBS then stalled until M-------- gave them a deadline. They did not meet it.
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We withdrew it, showed it to NBC and they paid me a thousand bucks for one year’s experimental use. They renewed it the following year. They did not conclude the deal because union rules in New York forbid any set element to be larger than 4 × 8 feet, and this would involve joints which showed on the image.
It was attempted to make the screen roll up, but Scotchlite then was made only with an aluminum foil back. When rolled up, it stretched, and when unrolled it wrinkled. After two years they quit.
Jenfred, Inc., had seen some experiments made by a guy named Jenkins who, before I thought of the idea, had attempted something of the sort. I learned that they were making plans to build a complete stage set unit for live TV shows on local stations. They supplied one unit which provided standard conventional sets, rear-projections, and they were going to use my gadget, not knowing it was patented. When shown my patents, they made an undertaking to develop and market the gadget. They wanted only still-projection rights. That’s what they got. They killed time for two years, and at last had a rollable screen, etc., but by that time there were no longer any live shows.
Kerkow had a similar, in appearance, idea. He used a reflex screen, projected direct to it, and got a very bright returned image. But he could only use it for animation. An actor in his apparatus did not mask his own shadow.
When shown my apparatus, he took out a license, which he kept in force for two years for some uses, and for a third in some others. There is confusion here, but he insisted that Jenfred warned him that my patents were invalid and he’d get in trouble if he continued.
RCA used it and paid royalty. They used it again and paid royalty. They made some top-secret films with it and paid. They made an RCA animation film with it and were so pleased with the color, etc., that they had more than 300 prints made for each RCA dealer to have one.
Then came the latest stuff. The Rank Movie people, in England, got patents on a special reflex material to be used with a partially silvered glass. There was no U.S. patent. The thing was patented in England, France, Belgium; I think Germany, and Mexico. My patents date before it. At the present time they are promoting what they call the Alakan-Gerard Process. It is my gadget, minus a number of features. The SOS Company has now advertised that it supplies the material for the Alakan-Gerard process.
CBS paid five thousand dollars for a license to combine it with their vistocene gadget (private information says it didn’t work before, and they had to save their bacon by making something ok after spending so much money; but that if they threw away the rest of the gadget they’d be better off ) and they wouldn’t have paid that much if they didn’t think the patents were airtight.
That’s the stuff to date. Here is some added material.
My gadget gives more than twenty-five times as much light as rear projection.
For RCA it has been used to get color effects superior to any they’ve had before.
Again for RCA, some special-effect work gave some types of animation a rather remarkable speed. We have a film in which much of the animation was shot at 25 frames per second, and the animation-cost of the film was only 10 percent of the same animation with other processes.
Since my screen returns all light to its source, it also returns stray light to its source. Front projection pictures are shot in a normally lighted studio. The floor space is only one-half of that required for rear projection.
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Again, since my screen — any reflex screen — returns all lights to its source, more than one projector can throw an image on the screen at the same time. If two projectors are separated by an angle slightly under 15d, referred to the screen, they each receive back their own image. This means that an actor can be shot at different angles with appropriately modified backgrounds by two or more cameras. Since the camera shoots along the optical axis of the projection, the image does not key-stone, to the camera.
If a second screen is placed before the first, with its edge, say, lined up with a projected doorway-edge, an actor walking out from behind the second screen appears to walk onto the set through the door, i.e. here is projection with practical entrances and exits. “Practical” sets of reflex screen can be assembled and
“painted” with light.
One new thing has turned up. The brightness of the image, from the appropriate position behind the half-silver glass plate, is so great that one can project microfilm on a vertical screen in a normally lighted office.
As a test of this, I took a unit out of doors in daylight. Seated at a desk with no hood, I was able to read reflected material. This gives a new dimension to microfilm information storage, in a sense. One can even put a screen on an office side-wall or ceiling, and have it used by a number of different men at the same time.
I tried to keep this short.
Daddy
In early 1963, Billee got a phone call in her Haddonfield home. A male voice said, “This is Sherman Fairchild. I understand your father has a patent on a device for front projection. I’d like to talk about it.” As a result of that call, Billee and her husband went to dinner at Fairchild’s mansion in the Upper East Side in New York City. The three of them sat at one end of a table that would seat 12, Sherman Fairchild at the head with a telephone at his right hand. He said he was interested in buying the patents, stated his offer, said it was a good one, and emphasized that he had a lot of money to run with the project, and Will Jenkins had very little.
Will signed with him.
In his article “Applied Science Fiction,” in Analog’s November 1967 issue, Will ended his story about the initial development of front projection with: So there you are. I enjoyed puttering over this thing into existence, even if the current production models make me feel less smart because I couldn’t have built them. I’ve done a lot of puttering, but this is the only item I sweated over. I like to think there are units in use right now in such unexpected places as the Pentagon and at Polaroid headquarters and The Saturday Evening Post and Life and Glamour, and that they are used regularly by large furniture manufacturers and mail order catalogue publishers and that there is one functioning admirably behind the Iron Curtain. And there are local TV stations putting on local programs with 35mm slides furnishing their backgrounds — and they don’t haul scenery around at all.
It’s a nice, complacent feeling. I even feel slightly noble.
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Front projection is a relatively simple concept that was waiting to be developed ever since Scotchlite was invented in the 1940s. To summarize, the camera is focused on the subject standing in front of a highly reflective screen.
A projector, at 90 degrees to the camera, projects an image of the background onto a partially silvered mirror angled at 45 degrees, which is located in front of the camera. The mirror, in turn, reflects the image onto the performer and the screen.
What is key is the necessity for careful alignment of all pieces so that the projected light source and the camera lens are located at the same point. This allows the projected light to be reflected directly back to its source, which is now inside the camera. It also helps to have a knowledge of physics.
Will figured it out, and it was used successfully for several years in still photography and television studios. Stanley Kubrick took it to the next step when he seized on the technique for his groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The “Dawn of Man” sequence would probably have been financially impossible to film without its use. He also used front projection for the scenes of astronauts walking on the moon and was still using it in his 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut.
Other producers added their adaptations. The British film On His Majesty’s Secret Service used front projection, and it was later used with further refinements for Christopher Reeve’s flying scenes in Superman.
Digital is now the most common technique for special effects.
A new, unexpected diversion appeared at the beginning of 1962. Will described it to Jo-an in a letter dated January 22, “In the short and simple annals of your parents there isn’t much excitement, but we have suddenly developed a situation causing great excitement in (of all things) archaeological circles. An Early American garbage pit has been discovered on the lawn — or under it — and you should have a report.”
In digging up the stump of a dead walnut tree, a mass of old brick masonry with oyster lime shell mortar was found buried three feet underground. Will’s son-in-law Billy DeHardit called a friend at Williamsburg Restoration, the chief archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume, who came to look at it.
Excavation soon revealed a large number of oyster shells and, among them, pieces of white clay pipes with the letters SA impressed upon them, which immediately aroused Hume’s interest.
Will continued:
It appears that a mysterious master pipe maker about the year 1700 made pipes so marked which are found in the digs at Williamsburg. Then up came a fragment of a red clay pipe stem, and Hume observed happily that it was probably one of the pipes the Indians made to sell to the early colonists. Then 144
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fragments of tin-glazed pottery. A cryptic mass of iron rust, which Hume said instantly was a pair of scissors. More pipes.
Hume, pink-cheeked with excitement, revealed that there had at some time been a refuse pit — Anglice (meaning in the English manner) garbage dump —
whose center was there and it was an earlier garbage dump than had ever been found away from Jamestown. Even Williamsburg does not contain — he deduces — such truly Early American — practically primeval — garbage. The top of this garbage heap is from about the year 1700.
Will was delighted. He treasured the history of his old house, which was dated about 1690, retaining with pride the foot-long, hand-forged iron key that opened the original lock, still in the front door. Now, the possession of early rubbish, interesting enough for the chief archaeologist at Williamsburg to investigate, was a triumph indeed.
Hume later described his discoveries in Excavations at Clay Bank in Glou -
cester County, Virginia, 1962 –1963. In a letter of sympathy to Betty and Bill DeHardit after Will’s death in 1975, Hume noted that Will had contributed to the nation’s archaeological heritage and “his gift of the Clay Bank artifacts to the Smithsonian will be a lasting memorial of that fact.” His contributions to science fiction were recognized in 1963 when he was named guest of honor for Discon I, the 21st World Science Fiction Convention. Always modest, he said little about it, but he was deeply pleased.
Sam Moskowitz’s comments in Seekers of Tomorrow (World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1966) went into detail:
Like the alien in “The Strange Case of John Kingman,” the science-fiction community awoke one day in 1962 to the realization that Will F. Jenkins alias Murray Leinster was an unusual phenomenon. Here was a man who had again and again proved he was a leader, if not master, of the field in all its transforma-tions and nuances. On September 1, 1963, he was Guest of Honor of the 21st World Science Fiction Convention, held at the Statler-Hilton, Washington, D.C.
For more than a decade they had called him “the dean of science fiction;” now they had decided to make it official.
John W. Campbell wrote “An Appreciation” for the program book including the following:
I remember Will telling me that he had, for several years, practically made his living by using the formulas in a book on How to W
rite Short Stories. They way you do it, he explained, was to take each rule the book offers — and dream up a story which specifically and flatly violates that rule. Since all short story books have dozens of inviolable rules on story telling, you immediately have material for scores of stories. You know — like “all adventure stories must have fast action — movement — something happening in every line,” so you write a story about a man sitting quietly on the bottom of the bay, with his foot trapped by a giant clam, waiting to see whether the clam’s shell-muscle will tire enough to free him before his SCUBA air supply gives out.
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Edmund Hamilton said in his tribute:
His technical knowledge and his ability to use it lucidly are very unusual. A lot of us may glibly tell how our hero “quickly constructed a small instrument” that did unusual things. Not Leinster. He tells you how the gadget was constructed step by step, how and why it works and the whole thing is so convinc-ing that you feel he ought to go out and patent it.
Ted Sturgeon wrote, “I’ve remarked publicly, more than once before, about his ability to make science demonstrations out of a pane of glass, a No.
6 dry cell, cardboard, glue, and paper clips.”
Mike Resnick, science fiction author and executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe, recalls, “Will was Guest of Honor at the very first convention I ever attended — Discon 1, the 1963 Worldcon in Washington, D.C. I’d taken a 24-hour train ride to get there, knew nobody, and didn’t know quite how to approach these giants of the field ... but Will made it very easy. He found time to chat with me and encouraged me to pursue my dream of becoming a science fiction writer. It was the only time I ever met him, but it left an indelible and favorable impression.”
John Clute, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Granada, 1979), had thoughts about why Will earned the title of “Dean.” For the first ten years or so of my life as a sf reader, from about 1953 to about 1963, Murray Leinster was everywhere. Only slowly did I begin to realize that he differed from some of his apparent contemporaries — like Christopher Anvil or John Brunner or Robert Sheckley — by the fact that he had been everywhere for a very long time. Some of his vast output was pure entertainment; some of it offered more than just fun. What he gave us at his best was a generous clarity that conveyed a sense of inevitability to his conceptual breakthroughs; what he always gave us was a sense of inherent decency. For half a century, he wrote of parallel worlds and futures in which it would be possible to be decent. He was called the Dean of Science Fiction for several good reasons, one of those reasons being that he did us honour.
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