Physics genius Leonard Lipton changed the way we see films – and wrote a hit song

Technology pioneered by Leonard Lipton is in cinemas everywhere, helped develop medical imaging and even drives the Mars Rover.

Leonard Lipton was an American author, filmmaker, lyricist and inventor.

OBITUARY
Leonard Lipton. Inventor and filmmaker.

Born New York City, May 18, 1940; died Los Angeles, October 5, aged 82.

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Most people date photography and motion film back to the inventions of Louis Daguerre, whose daguerreotype images astonished the world. Some credit Thomas Wedgwood – Charles Darwin’s uncle – who in about 1800 developed a fleeting process that captured crude images that could not be fixed.

Leonard Lipton reckoned you had to look back further, to Dutchman Christiaan Huygens and his so-called magic lantern. In 1659, Huygens built a device that shone a light on to a mirror that in turn reflected it through a small glass square bearing an image that was projected on to a wall.

“There has been a tendency in the past for film scholars to think that everything before Thomas Edison’s camera and the Lumieres’ Cinematographe is prehistory. But I didn’t view it that way,” he said last year.

You’d back in Lipton’s theory; no one knew more of the history of film technology, about which he wrote acclaimed books.

He also made short independent movies and pioneered some of the technologies that led to the rebirth of 3D film, aerial mapping, medical imaging and the navigation systems driving the Mars rover – funding most of this on the income from a poem he wrote in 1959 that his friend Peter Yarrow turned into the song Puff, The Magic Dragon.

Lipton completed a physics degree at the Ivy League Cornell University, where he had started studying electrical engineering – at which he was “mediocre”. He will probably be best remembered for his contribution to the renaissance (possibly fleeting, yet again) of 3D films. They have been about for more than a century, but while the clunky technology improved, the cost of creating them made each production a gamble for an already risky business.

He formed the StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980 to exploit the technological advances he felt would reignite 3D films and provide what he termed “flickerless stereoscopic projection”. His systems are reportedly used in 80,000 cinemas worldwide.

Subsequent technologies contributed to molecular modelling and later the improvements to the Hubble telescope, which astronauts have visited five times for repairs and upgrades.

Some of the books he wrote became the enduring manuals of the industry: Independent Filmmaking was published in 1972, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema arrived a decade later, and last year he published The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology From the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era, which includes a list of the patents Lipton thought invaluable to filmmaking. He had 72 of his own. He received many honours including a Lumiere Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1996 was honoured by the Smithsonian Institution.

None of this might have happened but for a sheet of paper he left on a typewriter one morning on which he had tapped out a poem that had come to him as he thought about the eccentric Ogden Nash’s 1936 curiosity The Tale of the Custard Dragon. Nash’s third paragraph states:

Custard the dragon had big sharp teeth,

And spikes on top of him and scales underneath,

Mouth like a fireplace, chimney for a nose,

And realio, trulio, daggers on his toes.

Puff was born, along with the possibly mournful – depending on which way you look at it – tale of Jackie Paper leaving childhood behind. It remains one of the world’s best-loved songs and reached No. 2 on Billboard on April 29, 1963 (kept there by Little Peggy March’s I Will Follow Him).

That typewriter belonged to Yarrow, later of Peter, Paul and Mary fame. Lipton was friends with Yarrow’s Cornell roommate. Yarrow also studied physics but changed to psychology. He liked the idea of Puff and worked on making it into a song.

Two years later Yarrow joined with Mary Travers and Paul Stookey to perform folk songs in Greenwich Village, the then epicentre of folk music where they often rubbed shoulders with an unknown Bob Dylan, whose songs they would make famous.

Peter, Paul and Mary sang Puff, the Magic Dragon live for about a year before recording their first album but left it off. With a hit on their hands they quickly recorded another and Puff was released as a single.

Lipton denied for years that it included any references to drugs, a suggestion published by legendary New York journalist Dorothy Kilgallen (the only reporter to interview Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby and who also died in mysterious circumstances in 1965).

There was a last verse to Puff, in which he found another little boy to play with, but Yarrow misplaced the sheet of paper and Lipton could never remember the words.