Before the Second World War, Fred Waller (1886-1954), head of special effects at Paramount Studios, experimented with wide-screen projection. In 1939 he demonstrated ‘Vitarama’ – which used eleven projectors and a spherical screen – at the New York World’s Fair.

After the outbreak of war, Waller adapted his system to create the ‘Flexible Gunnery Trainer’. Films of aircraft in flight were projected by five synchronised projectors on to a curved screen. The trainee sat at the controls of a dummy machine gun, seeing the same view that he would have in actual combat. When the gun was ‘fired’ the aiming position was linked to a machine which recorded the number of shots on target. At the same time, the trigger handle vibrated to give the correct feel of a gun firing. Eighty-five trainers were built and thousands of airmen were trained on them. At the end of the war, the US government credited Waller’s work with saving over 350,000 casualties.

After the war, Waller refined his system for use in the cinema, calling it Cinerama. The first Cinerama feature, This Is Cinerama, opened in 1952. One of the most spectacular sequences in the film is a dramatic shot of water skiers. This reflects one of Waller’s other great passions. In 1922, Ralph Samuelson, an 18-year-old from Minnesota, became the world’s first water skier. He tried, not very successfully, to ski on water using snow skis. The first patent for water skis, called ‘Dolphin Akwa-Skees’, was taken out in 1925 by…Fred Waller.