Charles Urban was not a film director, but as the most important producer of films in Britain in the pre-1914 period, he wielded considerable influence on the overall direction of early British film. He was born on 15 April 1867 in Cincinnati of German immigrant parents, and set up a Kinetoscope parlour in Chicago in 1895. The Bioscope projector was developed for him, and with this notable asset, he was taken on by Edison concessionaries Maguire & Baucus, who, in 1897, sent him to London to be their British manager. The dynamic Urban had an immediate effect on the company's business and British film in general. He renamed the company the Warwick Trading Company, and built up a considerable reputation based upon actuality film (notably of the Anglo-Boer War), high-quality equipment, and the distribution of films by Lumière, Méliès, Williamson, the Sheffield Photo Company, G.A. Smith and others. He formed the Charles Urban Trading Company in 1903, and there developed his personal vision of cinema, based upon actuality, travel, science and natural history. He cultivated scientific filmmakers with a populist streak, notably F. Martin Duncan and Percy Smith, and significantly extended the educational use of film. He also produced fiction films of generally meagre quality, many through his French offshoot Eclipse. Urban's greatest triumphs came with the two-colour (red-green) Kinemacolor system, the world's first natural colour film system, invented by G.A. Smith in 1906. Kinemacolor was a worldwide sensation between 1908 and 1914, the highlight being the two-hour epic With Our King and Queen Through India, which depicted the 1912 Delhi Durbar. Urban's fortunes turned in 1914, starting with a court case brought by William Friese-Greene (inventor of a rival colour film system), which led to the invalidation of the Kinemacolor patent. Urban produced a wartime documentary feature, Britain Prepared (1915), but he had mixed fortunes trying to sell the film, and other British o