Foundation

Arthur  C. Pillsbury

Extending Human Vision
 Arthur C. Pillsbury's Life Goal

A study of the rapid changes in science during the 20th Century attests to his having achieved his goal.

This is the Official Website for the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
The ACPillsburyFoundation.org is a Memorial Site, not updated since 2012.

Accessing newly available records from the Film Industry, Newspapers & Institutions

     Arthur C. Pillsbury (AC) created and dominated a segment of the early movie industry.  Before that, he was a major presence in the nascent aeronautic industry, both photographing and filming events and overseeing crews during large events, for instance the first International Air Show in the US in 1910.  Today, these specializations are  known as 'nature movies', 'science films', 'Edu-tainment'. 
        We began organizing documentation of AC's life and work in decades.  Then, we realized some of these decades were too large to load.  The publication of newspapers and magazines we have learned contains far more than we realized existed about AC's life and work and the strategy he was carrying out to achieve his duel goals for protecting nature and advancing human understanding of the natural world and science. The material for each year began running to between 60 and 100 pages, which impacts how fast the material can load. 

      These compiled time lines, made up of contemporary documents and a narrative, are accessible above as they are completed. Our thanks both to the educational and other organizations who had made the original documents available online.  
 
      Pillsbury realized film was the medium needed to break the hold of 'theories'  generated by 'experts' that left humanity dependent on assertions which could not be either proven or disproven.  One example is the book written by Cotton Mather,  "On Witchcraft", published in 1692, on how you prove someone is a witch. That book experienced a surge in sales during the Salem Witch Trials, to Mather's delight.  The links above provide a wealth of information about Pillsbury's work, and we are constantly adding more, so check back get Updates.

      The  TimeLines will extend beyond 1892 - 1946, the year AC died, and extend into retrospectives by decades on his work, 1947 - 2029.  There are single year links such as 1909, 1910, and 1919 at this time in research.  If you find an article, photo postcard, or any reference to Arthur C. Pillsbury, please consider donating the original for a tax deduction to the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation, or please send a scan of both sides of the item along with your permission to use in all ways and we will credit you on the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation website. Thanks for your help, it is much appreciated.

    The A.C. Pillsbury Foundation, and myself, personally as well, acknowledge our thanks to the many institutions which discovered the tools Grandfather created to extend human vision. A list of these, as we find them, is available on our original site at ACPillsburyFoundation.org   
My sincere thanks!  ​Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
  

1892 - 1946 and 1947 - Present Retrospectives

Wildflower Epiphanies 

      Grandfather's epiphany took place in 1895; mine in 1991.
    This is a century-long story of a brilliant man determined to change how people see our world.  Instead of seeing themselves apart from nature they needed to understand, feel, and accept, all life flows from the same source.        Nature can not be used up and thrown away because humanity is also a part of that world.  Arthur C. Pillsbury was one man, but he moved millions of people to see this truth.  How he accomplished this, and yet today is nearly forgotten, explains how and he was eliminated, explaining why we are facing devestation  today.   
   In 1990 I learned a shocking truth that will explain how we have been manipulated for so long. 
     From 1906 those who saw and heard his movies called him - ​​

By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The Wildflower Man of Yosemite
The First 2-Way Interactive Century  Show Series

   1895 & 1991

The growing list of characters who will appear in our 2-Way Interactive Show Series, now estimated to run for 5 of more years, covering the years 1892 - 1946, appear in a list of pages under Century Story Info, and another list under Other Characters.  More are being added as the script development moves forward. 

Help us rebuild it by sending us the numbers, and get ACP Crypto Coupons for helping!

Understanding Arthur C. Pillsbury

In 2010 I produced the short movie above with the assistance of Joyce Brand, a filmographer and friend.  Much more research has happened since, but it is well worth watching. 

For me, this work had begin in the automn of 1986 when Dad, AC's youngest son, asked me to ensure a book was written about Arthur C. Pillsbury.  As soon as I agreed, Dad immediately asked me to 'get the probate papers', both sets.  Arthur Clarence was his uncle, namesake, and godfather.  He and his two siblings were legally adopted by AC when he was six years old, just weeks after Dr. Ernest S. Pillsbury and his wife, their mother, were killed in an auto accident.  ADOPTION
     
Over the next years it became obvious from what Dad said, that in all ways but biological, the man who 'fathered' him was Arthur C. Pillsbury (AC), his adopted father and uncle.  They remained close all of their lives.
     
At first, I got to know AC only through Dad's eyes.  I was moved by the love and respect I held for Dad.  Then, some years after Dad died on April 12, 1991, I realized where Grandfather's work was heading.  It was an entirely unexpected epiphany. I was stunned and experienced a surge of love and respect that brought tears to my eyes.  It still does.  I mightly wished Grandfather had not died two years before I was born, March 12, 1946.
     
Grandfather was a man on a mission, and that mission was to extend human vision and understanding of the world of which each of us is a part. Studying his inventions, when these took place, and his attitude about each of them revealed the story.  Looking over the time line and subsequent action is always very revealing.  I already knew that from my other work.  
   

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Specimen Slicer
for Microscope

First Circuit Panorama Camera - 1897
Used in 1898 - 1899 to record the Yukon and in 1906 during the 
1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire

After returning from the Yukon in December 1899, AC relocated to Los Angeles and worked from there from 1900 - 1903 running his photographic business.  He built on his business of providing photos for photo postcard businesses, made his own postcards, and sold photos to Underwood & Underwood, among others.  In 1903 he relocated back to San Francisco, though he continued to take and develop photos in Oakland while at the same time accepting the job of setting up the photographic departments for the Hearst papers.  He was also writing for Camera Craft.  His work at the paper included photographing the trip of Theodore Roosevelt to California and acting for the paper, he accompanied Roosevelt to Yosemite and photographed the presdent and his retinue in the Mariposa Grove.  

In March 1906 he quit the Hearst papers and started his own company, Pillsbury Pictures Company, Inc.,  On April 18, 1906, he was thrown out of bed by the earthquake, grabbing his camera before hitting the floor, and headed out to San Francisco.  His enormous shoot of the unfolding events were recorded with stills,  panoramas, and likely film.  After several months of shooting and selling the photos, including panoramas, to papers and magazines around the world, he went on a trip around California to the Spanish Missions. 

He included in his trip a visit to Yosemite where he arranged to purchase the building, intended for selling Locomobiles, originally built by Oliver Lippincott, who had driven the first Locomobile into Yosemite in 1901.  Lippincott ran into financial difficulties and sold the building to Harold Taylor and Eugene Hallett during the winter of 1902-3. Hallett and Taylor operated the studio as the "Studio of the Three Arrows" during 1903 - 1906, agreeing to sell the studio to Pillsbury in 1906 because the yearly payments to the Park Services had risen sharply. 

During AC's time in Alaska he had met John Muir, who was a guest of Edward H. Harriman on his expedition on the steamship George W. Elder.  AC photographed Muir on board the ship while it was in port before continuing to the headwaters of the Yukon River for his solo canoe 1,929 mile  voyage to the Pacific Ocean.  

Pillsbury kept in touch with Muir, photographing him during his trips to Yosemite. 
In 1897 he had purchased a studio in Yosemite, partnering with Julius Boysen; he sold his share to his partner when his wife of six months left him; she refused to spend time in the wilderness of Yosemite.  This was the disappointment which sent him to the Yukon. 

Now, he turned his thoughts to how he could  stop the destruction of the wildflowers which had so moved him during his visit to Yosemite with friends in 1895.  The destination had been suggested to him by a friend of his mother's, Susan B. Anthony when he accompanied her to the Women's Conference taking place in San Francisco in 1895.  

On his return from Alaska, he discovered the meadows were being routinely mowed to provide fodder for the Buffalo Soldiers, who patrolled the Park during the summer months.

In 1908 Pillsbury produced a film opposing the Hetch Hetchy being taken and offered it to Muir so it could be shown across the country and persuade the public of the value of the Hetch Hetchy, known as 'the other Yosemite'.  Muir was worried film, so new, could not work, and so declined the offer.  But Pillsbury realized the potential for using film to educate and persuade people to see the life parallels  for people with the natural world, and became a film maker.  


This and other films were shown at the Pillsbury Studio beginning in 1910 to rapidly growing audiences after dark at the Pillsbury Studio.  But the mowing continued.  In 1912 Pillsbury built the first lapse-time camera, recording the life cycle of multiple species and showed it to the 1912 Conference of Park Superintendents, who met in Yosemite on October 14 - 16 that year.  Mowing was immediately stopped. 

By 1915 AC was producing movies which he used for his lecture engagements and tours. His films were also being shown in movie theaters.  These were both scientific and showed events, such as the High Trips for the Sierra Club on the Club's yearly jaunts.   

AC's business was prospering enough so he could begin thinking about more ways to change views on the natural world.  To lower the cost of the postcards he sold, AC built the first mass-production postcard machine.  His cards were inexpensive for tourists to buy, but he used beautiful images to impact the viewer and ignite their interest in, and love of the natural world. 

His next invention was the Microscopic Motion Picture Camera.  His experience with his brother's disappointment with the medical establishments unwillingness to realize that  not understanding the world beyond human sight made their theories mere speculation.  

AC's lecture tours rapidly increased from 1915 on.  He was in demand by national organizations and universities.  His lectures accompanied his films, which were both visually compelling and leading the edge of science at this time.  M.I.T. was just one of the teaching institutions which asked him to include them in his eastern tour each year.  By 1919 his films had been licensed for foreign distribution by Universal, Paramount, and Pathe. 

In 1925 AC showed his first film of cells dividing to an eminent group of scientists and professors at UC Berkeley.  When the lights went on at the films end the assembled experts were bewildered, having no way to understand what they had just seen.  

The development of the use of film for education started with AC.  He moved into sound as soon as it was available but continued to use silent films, accompanied by scripts, as well.    

The reason you have not heard of him takes us to the elimination of his work in Yosemite.  On November 4, 1927 his studio in Yosemite was destroyed by a fire set by his janitor, who had been soliticted to carry this out and remove a life's collection of still photos and films.  More on this will appear in A Voice for the Wildflowers,  by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster.
AC's microscopic work began at a borrowed lab at UC Berkeley.  He also used land provided there for his work in hydroponics, a reintroduction of what had existed in Mexico City centuries before.  

But left with huge debts at the loss of his Yosemite Studio, his forward progress for extending human vision took some different avenues than he had initially planned for.

Below, you see his work after 1927.  1929, X-Ray motion pictures of plants growing and in 1930 underwater films make in Samoa.  His work was well known and sought by the film industry, for which he had become famous.  Through the recent online availability of such publications as The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films, the National Board of Review Magazine, and more, his work became a standard for today's film industry.  This first camera was huge, but the movies AC made using it changed our world.  Others, seeing this, realized the difference between theory, guessing, and speculation and change in every part of science reflected this in the decades to come.  

Microscopic images of
plant cells and threads
​from AC's films, 1925

Arthur C. Pillsbury with his Microscopic Camera - 1925

1929 - The first X-Ray Motion Picture Camera

More rapidly than anyone could have expected, new cameras capable of  taking the human eye beyond what science thought possible continued to appear.

Here, you see a lapse-time X-Ray motion picture of roses flowering, with their delicate petals grown transparent to the human eye.  

The image was often viewed as a new kind of art, and it still holds that potential.  Nature, uninterpreted, calls to us on many levels.  

The first Underwater Helmet and the first Underwater Camera 1930

In the frame of him underwater you see a note pad that allows him to record the astonishing array of colors he encountered and record these himself.  He also designed the pad and writing instrument needed.  He was, himself, the producer, director, writer, videographer, time-lapse special effect, colormetry special effects for esthetic realism, grip, and actor, narrator, both silent and sound on film, and life-support supervisor for deep sea diving stunt and starfish rangler!
Lloyd Bridges was only an actor who did his own stunts on Sea Hunt, but he and Arthur F. Pillsbury, AC's youngest son, were co-scoutmasters when they lived around the corner from each other in West Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.  

Photos in the Pillsbury Collection at BYU.

And here are the four men who ensured Arthur C. Pillsbury vanished from history.


AC built the first underwater helmet, the first underwater camera and took these to Samoa where he filmed the first underwater motion picture film.  But this was not an advanture story, he was there 
to show his watchers a world beyond their sight.

Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life
​by Arthur C. Pillsbury

​You never know how long a life you are alloted to finish the work that matters most to you.  
In 1937 Pillsbury wrote Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life, published by J. B. Lippincott Co. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  AC was a major figure in the film industry for his films, which grew into the industry for films on scientific developments from post-graduate and for entertainment and shown in schools to all ages.  The multiple publications in which his films, and articles about his films, and Pillsbury himself appeared frequently in these and access to this archive is now accessible through this site.   

The other issue of concern to Grandfather was the misuse of patents, which he could see, even then were being used to stifle innovations which were much needed to ensure optimal and humane use of the technologies he saw would be coming on line.  Therefore, knowing that many of these depended on his own inventions, which will minor exceptions he had not patented, he published instructions for building each of his own inventions making it impossible for the use of these to be limited. 

Go to the LINK to download a PDF of Miracles, which the BioDiversity History Library has made available.   

Stephen T. Mather

Ansel Adams

Horace Albright

Steven D. Harrison

Uncovering the Cover-Up

   The criminal activities of Stephen Mather (Link leads to several pages of material) and Horace Albright were covered up successfully. Today, that cover-up is shredding as we confront many cover-ups, allowing us to understand the impact the elites of AC's day had on America. The impact of the covert actions carried out by the Eastern financial interests, and the Elites of San Francisco, remains with us today.
       Arthur C. Pillsbury was the equivalent for his time of the leading edge in high-tech.  In the materials recently discovered on the film industry from its beginning to the time of AC's death in 1946, only two other men are mentioned in the same catagory with him.  These are Albert Einstein and Luther Burbank. AC's work applied the new industry of movies to create edu-tainment, drew tens of thousands, and then millions into a direct understanding of nature and science.  
     Pillsbury's films, always increasing in number and topics, were regularly shown three nights every week at the Pillsbury Studio, first in Old Village and in 1924 in New Village in the 375-seat theater at the Pillsbury Studio in New Village. Soon, these were also showing in regular theatres, licensed by Pathe, Universal, and Paramount by 1919.  Films included lapse-time for flowers and microscopic motion pictures of incredible images; as you read above, Americans first saw cells dividing in 1925.   


This is the First Century Story
Minor Characters - Documents - Events, Timelines  & Locations - Contemporary Publications

 Some of the people you will encounter
Some of them helpful, some horrified - and some just greedy

This correspondence is organized to include  to letters all relating to A.C. Pillsbury and his work.  This includsd how the Pillsbury Collection came to be located at BYU in the Harold B. Lee Library, L. Tom Perry Special Collections.  Answering this question involved many sources for information.  The letters speak for themselves, which is why they were scanned in and listed chronologically.  More were added as the story continued.  These  documents have allowed us to better understand the whole of Pillsbury's work and life and have been added to our archive.


The borders on the photos below indicated who being targeted with lies, who was engaged in the ongoing conspiracy, and who was only peripherally involved and did not know what was really going on.  Red for Liars, White for those targeted, Yellow for those who either had no knowledge of what was happening OR who had motives that motivated them to ignore the available facts.   

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The Adams Cover-Up

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​​More Interesting revelations are on the way!

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Arthur C. Pillsbury
The Man Who Spoke for the Wildflowers

Defeated 1912
Died Dec. 1914

1892 - 2024

More color indicators - Shades of green are those concerned and believe, maybe erroneously, those who are working with them agree on the need to stop raping the earth as a life strategy.  These folks can be wrong, but they do not yet realize this.  Other colors indicate objective facts, for instance maps and early technologies.  Red and gold also fall in these catagories.   Some of the people you will encounter here are like Clyde Pangborn, fascinating people who are living lives of adventure and meaning but are not a significant part of the ongoing drama being played out.

The Curry Family was outraged by the false charges made against Foster Curry and the attempts to steal Curry Camping Company by Mather, using Tresidder.

Antagonists

1915 -  1928

Exposing the 
​Cover-ups

Stephen T. Mather
Francis Marion Smith

Tools can always be had to do the job.

If you make it worth their time and  the risk

Albright's Failure -
Loving an evil man

Cover-Ups 1966 - 2022​​

 the article was "awesome." 
March - February
2018 

The Battle for Freedom Against Government Monopoly​​​​

Antagonists Continue Cover-up

More Background & Insights

Analysis and Comparisons of Pillsbury & Adams Photographs​​

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Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka

When Charlotte and I began talking about the Norsigian Negatives,which Rick Norsigian had purchased at a garage sale in Fresno, California, she had already noticed some oddities with supposedly 'early' Adams photos.  So she did comparisons.  Photography is her life's avocation and during those months, starting in 2010 she suffered some shocks.  She had been a life-long admirer of Ansel Adams.    

Norsigian had first contacted me in September 2001 about the negatives he had purchased.  This led Charlotte and myself in unexpected directions. 
For the full story visit the Inquiry Page, which includes Charlotte's analysis of using comparisions of AC's photos with those claimed to be by Ansel Adams.    

Don't miss this story, either!

      Individuals involved inadvertently in the rising action become involved,  demonstrating the conspiracy was active decades later.   This was a surprise to Melinda, who wrote a book on her grandfather, Arthur C. Pillsbury, titled "A Tour of Old Yosemite."  Although it received sterling reviews, and Steve Medley, then President of the Yosemite Association, was delighted when he read it as we sat across from each other at his desk.  After his untimely death, his replacement, running the concessions, refused to sell it in any of their stores.  They also refused to sell items that had originally been featured in the store for the Pillsbury Studio.  Melinda had not realized at that point, 2004, how determined the NPS was to eliminate any mention of her Grandfather.
          The truth was displaced with lies for the benefit of an array of individuals who, clearly, would not have been viewed as elites of anything if not for their greedy and dishonest ways.  
        Eventually, she accepted it was not possible to trust anyone who had connections to the NPS, the Sierra Club or to anyone in Yosemite whose stature and or income depended to continuing the narrative of lies created to cover for Mather, Albright, Adams, and their numerous later co-conspirators.   

A Tour of Old Yosemite was very well reviewed-but not accepted by the NPS.

Reconfiguring History, One Piece at a Time
When you see actions that are coordinated and have a common purpose it is time to ask how and why this is taking place.  The objective facts on the crimes and cover-up  being carried out by  different individuals where those in danger of exposure, for instance Mather, Albright, and Adams. 

​​Superintendent's Report

Banfield - Deuel
Stories & Timeline 

AEtheline was very different from her brothers or from Dr. Seneca Arthur Deuel, who she married in 1891.  Although I never met her the statements of my father and his sister, Grace Pillsbury Young, led me to conclude Sara Ethel Banfield was very manipulative and self-serving.  Arthur C. Pillsbury was a man entirely wrapped up in his work.  It is not strange that he rescued her, her son, and her brother, and took them on as responsibilities.  For 'Sara Ethal' Banfield's son, Arthur Dueul this ended immediately when Pillsbury learned Deuel had been terrorizing and battering his brother's children, who he had adopted, making them his own.  These incidents took place when Pillsbury was absent from the home.   Dueul, then 20 years old, was told to leave the house and find a job.  ​​