Paul was born in
Islington in London, and educated at the
City of London School. He began his technical career learning instrument-making skills at the
Elliott Brothers, a firm of London instrument makers founded in 1804, followed by the
Bell Telephone Company in
Antwerp. In 1891, he established an instrument-making company, the Robert W. Paul Instrument Company, and established a workshop at 44
Hatton Garden, London, which later became his office. In 1894, he was approached by two Greek businessmen who wanted him to make copies of an
Edison Kinetoscope that they had purchased. He initially refused until learning that Edison had not patented the invention in Britain. Paul purchased a Kinetoscope, reverse-engineering a model that could be manufactured in Britain. He manufactured a number of these - according to one account of his "200" but later revised this to "60". However, the only films available were 'bootleg' copies of those produced for the Edison machines. As Edison had patented his camera (the details of which were a closely guarded secret), Paul resolved to solve this bottleneck by creating his own camera. Via a mutual friend, Henry W. Short, Paul was introduced to
Birt Acres, a photographic expert and much-respected photographer who was the General Manager at Elliott & Son's photographic works. Acres had been working on a machine for rapid photographic printing, so Paul applied his discoveries in producing the "
Paul-Acres Camera", as named by historian John Barnes, in March 1895. It was the first camera made in England, capable of shooting film in Edison's 35mm format. On 24 October 1895, Paul applied for a patent for a device to evoke the effects that
H. G. Wells had described in his novel
The Time Machine, published the previous year monthly before being collected in a single volume edition the following year. Audiences would be given the illusion of traveling backwards or forwards in time, of seeing in close-up or at a distance life in eras long before or after their own times. Paul wrote, "The Spectators should be given the sensation of voyaging from the last epoch to the present, or the present epoch may be supposed to have been accidentally passed and a present scene represented on the machine coming to a standstill, after which the impression of travelling forward again to the present epoch may be given, and the re-arrival notified by the representation on the screen of the place at which the exhibition is held ..." The patent was never completed and nothing came of it. ==Film innovation==