David Horsley

Who was David Horsley?

David Horsley was an English-born pioneer of the film industry who built the first film studio in Hollywood.

Born in West Stanley, Durham, England, a small coal mining village where his entire family worked in the mines. At age nine, he fell on the railway tracks and his hand was badly injured when the train ran over it. Without proper medical care, and fearful of deadly gangrene poisoning, his arm was amputated about two inches below the elbow.

In 1884, the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Bayonne, New Jersey where as a young man he built a bicycle business and ran a pool hall. It was then that he met a former employee of Biograph Studios, Charles Gorman, and along with his brother William Horsley, they formed the Centaur Film Company. By 1910 their operation was producing three films a week, including the Mutt and Jeff comedies.

David and William Horsely, along with other film independents, succeeded in defeating the monopolistic hold on the industry of Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company. However, weather conditions on the east coast made filming an uncertain proposition because camera technology at the time relied on sunshine.