Career
He was hired by the archive"s founding curator, Ernest Lindgren, upon its creation in 1935, and remained in the post until his retirement in 1984. In his role at the BFI, Brown made a major contribution to the science of film preservation. He was possibly the first archivist to research systematically the process of nitrate film decomposition, and consequently to show that it can be inhibited by storage in a cool and dry atmosphere.
Brown is credited with having invented the term vinegar syndrome to describe the deacetylation of cellulose acetate film base.
He designed and built specialist printers to enable the preservation copying of shrunken and otherwise damaged originals. In retirement, Brown was a prominent volunteer with the Projected Picture Trust, restoring and operating historical projectors at a museum in Bletchley Park.
