From a young age, Cura had been interested in electronics and photography, developing a reputation among his family as a "Heath Robinson inventor". In June 1946, the BBC resumed its television service following the hiatus imposed by the Second World War. Cura, recently demobilised from the RAF, combined his twin passions of photography and electronics and began to experiment with developing a camera that could take pictures from a television screen. He eventually came up with a mechanism that took half-frame 18×24 mm images on 35 mm film (i.e. the same format as in 35 mm motion picture cameras), at a speed of 1/25th of a second.