Ernest A. (Ernest Alfred) Dench

Ernest Alfred Dench was an early 20th-century writer whose work focused on the emerging motion-picture industry. Records available online link him to books including Making the Movies (1915), Motion Picture Education (1917), and Advertising by Motion Pictures (1916), which together show a strong interest in both the practical side of filmmaking and the wider uses of film in everyday life.

His writing suggests he was one of those observers who recognized very early that cinema could be more than entertainment. He wrote about how films were produced, how they could be used in education, and how businesses might use moving pictures to reach audiences—ideas that now feel familiar, but were still novel at the time.

A small amount of film-related reference material also credits him as a writer on the 1913 production Social Aspirations. Beyond that, confirmed biographical details appear to be scarce, so the clearest picture of his life comes through the books he left behind and their glimpse into the first decades of movie culture.