The Kinetoscope

The World’s Fair at Chicago drew huge crowds from all parts of the world in 1893. The innumerable and varied side-shows evinced keen rivalry to obtain popular patronage. But there was one building sheltering a small instrument which made a particularly bold bid for public favour. It was a novelty, something that the man in the street had never seen before.

The announcement ran that “Edison’s Kinetoscope, showing photographs in motion, was to be seen for the first time.” It worked automatically, and to investigate the new wonder the curiosity-provoked sightseer dropped a nickel—a coin equal in value to 2½d.—into the slot, and applied his eye to the peep-hole, when he was treated to a new sensation for about 30 seconds. He saw photographic pictures flit before his gaze in such rapid succession that they appeared to be imbued with life. Children skipped, the lips of an orator moved in speaking, and so on. It certainly was a marvellous device, and those who availed themselves of the opportunity to see it in operation by means of the nimble nickel, expressed undisguised wonderment; to many it appeared uncanny.

The Kinetoscope, Fig. 3, was housed in a wooden cabinet with a hinged door at one side. Within was a wooden frame A, which carried a series of small reels B and B¹ arranged in two horizontal rows at either edge of the frame. At the top of the frame there were two larger wheels C, between which was a magnifying lens D. Behind the latter there was a small electric lamp and reflector F. In front of the magnifying lens there was a disc having a narrow radial slot near its edge, which constituted the shutter. This was rotated continuously, and completed one revolution during the passage of each image across the eye-piece or magnifying lens.

The ribbon of pictures, printed as transparencies upon a strip of celluloid film, somewhat dense so as to bring out the detail, formed an endless band E, 40 feet in length. This was threaded over the various reels in the manner shown in the illustration, and finally passed over the first large wheel C, thence to the second large wheel C, and back once more on to the reels B B¹. Though 40 feet constituted the average length of film employed, longer ones could be used within certain limits, by increasing the number of reels on the frame. As the film passed from one of the large wheels C to the other, it had to traverse the field of the magnifying lens, and the light, striking through the transparency, gave the person looking through the eye-piece a slightly magnified view of the picture.

The cabinet stood on end, so that one had to bend over the instrument to peer through the small eye-piece. When the coin dropped into the slot, an electric motor was started, setting the film and shutter in motion. The film travelled from left to right, while the shutter rotated in the opposite direction, cutting up the band of pictures into separate images, so that only one was seen at a time. The band travelled continuously, and each image was momentarily rendered visible by the light flashing through the radial slot in the shutter, the effect being the same as if the electric incandescent lamp were extinguished and relighted intermittently, at very brief intervals.

The shutter had to be revolved at sufficient speed to bring the radial slot near its edge centrally over an image; in other words, the shutter had to complete its revolution with sufficient speed to bring the opening over the picture at the moment the latter on the travelling celluloid film came into the centre of the field of the lens. When this operation was carried out with sufficient velocity, the images were seen in such rapid succession as to convey the idea of continuous motion, by virtue of the principle of visual persistence.

One point must be borne in mind. The band of pictures travelled continuously. It did not, as in the machine of to-day, make a momentary pause as it came between the light and the lens. The movement to-day is intermittent, not continuous, though, curiously enough, all the early experimenters strove first towards the perfection of the latter arrangement. Continuous motion of the film has proved to be impossible, because the shutter must revolve at such a speed that the illumination is not sufficient to produce a bright impression upon the screen.

In order to prevent the film slipping in any way while travelling over the smooth reels by friction, a toothed sprocket was introduced to ensure the film being fed regularly and steadily before the lens; and to secure a purchase upon the film the latter was perforated uniformly along the margin to engage with the sprocket teeth. Edison found, as a result of his experiments, that four perforations per picture, on either side of the film, gave the best results, though in his earliest investigations he confined himself to perforating only one edge in this manner.

Although many years have passed since the Kinetoscope first startled the public, the film has undergone but little change. The width remains the same; the dimensions of the picture are identical; and the perforation gauge has never been revised in regard to the number of holes per picture. The only salient difference between two Edison films, taken at intervals of twenty years, relates to the density of the picture, which nowadays, being projected upon a screen instead of being followed through a magnifying glass at short range, is thinner and lighter.

Brilliant as the Kinetoscope was, it made no great impression upon the public. It became known as the “peep-hole machine,” and was regarded, like the telephone in its early days, as a scientific toy. Edison appears to have failed to grasp its possibilities and the important part it was destined to play in our complex life, for he did not patent it in Great Britain.

The Animatograph

Among those who saw the instrument at the World’s Fair were two Greek visitors from London. One was a greengrocer, the other a toy-maker. With shrewd business instinct they perceived here an opportunity to make a fortune in England. The Kinetoscope was known only by name in London, and the search for novelty in regard to new forms of amusement inevitably brings a rich reward to the ingenious exploiter. The two men acquired a machine and brought it home with them, their intention being to make duplicates and instal them in public places, to work upon the penny-in-the-slot principle.

The two Greeks evidently were not animated by very lofty ideas of business integrity, for they did not trouble to ascertain if the Kinetoscope were patented in Great Britain.

Upon arrival in London they sought for a man who could duplicate the machine they had brought with them; and they approached Mr. Robert W. Paul, an electrical engineer and scientific instrument maker, who at that time had his workshops in Hatton Garden. They brought the Kinetoscope to him. He had never seen it before, and was deeply interested in its operation. When, however, they suggested that he should produce copies of it to their order, he declined, for he felt sure that Edison never would have omitted to secure its protection in Great Britain. He pointed out to the Greeks that reproduction would probably be illegal, and that both he and they would expose themselves to litigation and heavy damages for infringing a patent.

His clients expressed dissatisfaction at this decision and departed with the instrument. After they had gone, Paul was prompted to make a search at the Patent Office, and to his intense surprise he found that Edison had not protected his invention by taking out British patents. He was thus at liberty to build as many machines as he desired, and forthwith he set to work, not only for his Greek visitors, but also for his own market.

The experience with the Kinetoscope in the United States was duplicated in Great Britain, as, indeed, it was in every other country where it was placed on exhibition. Several machines were set up at apparently suitable points, but the public failed to respond. Two factors contributed to this result. In the first place, the machines were weighty, and as the electricity for driving the motor and lighting the incandescent electric lamp was drawn from accumulators, the whole apparatus was somewhat bulky and awkward to move from place to place. Besides, it was difficult to secure the necessary films; sufficient variety could not be supplied for the machines. Only one company was engaged at the time in their production—the American Kinetoscope Company—and the only studio in operation was at Orange in New Jersey, the output of which was relatively small. Under these circumstances public curiosity could not be sustained.

The difficulty with the film supply presently became still more acute. The American company learned that the Kinetoscope was being manufactured in England, and that American films were being used with English machines. As manufacture could not be prevented, owing to Great Britain being an open market, and as, consequently, Paul was perfectly justified in his action, the American company decided on a novel method of frustrating Mr. Paul’s efforts. Two agents, Maguire and Baucus, came to London and endeavoured to corner the English market. They secured the output of Kinetoscope films from America, and declined to sell them to anyone in Great Britain who did not possess an American-built machine. The result was that all the purchasers of the Paul Kinetoscopes found themselves unable to secure further films; even Paul himself could not obtain supplies.

The Americans regarded the outlook with complete self-satisfaction. They believed that the English market was within their grasp. But they reckoned without their host. Paul was determined not to be vanquished so easily, especially as he had sold Kinetoscopes to customers in all parts of the world, and had a steady stream of buyers flocking to his workshops from points as remote as Tokio, South America, and New Zealand. Many of these early purchasers of the British-built Kinetoscopes have since become famous in the world of cinematography either as producers or manufacturers, notably Monsieur Charles Pathé, the founder of the celebrated French cinematograph film manufacturing establishment, who was one of Paul’s first customers.

Now although Paul had manufactured several Kinetoscopes, he realised the disadvantages of the instrument. Only one person at a time could see the picture in animation. What was required in order to popularise moving pictures was to devise a way to enable several hundreds, or even thousands, of people to witness the same subject simultaneously.

Paul’s first idea was to convert the ordinary Kinetoscope into a projecting apparatus. While he was quietly considering the feasibility of this scheme he was introduced to another inventor Mr. Birt Acres, at that time in the employment of a firm engaged in the manufacture of dry plates and bromide papers. Acres had conceived a mechanical means of printing on bromide paper from glass negatives a number of copies of a subject at a very rapid rate, and had committed to paper his crude suggestion. He submitted his drawing to Paul. The negative was to be set in a frame, beneath which the bromide paper travelled over rollers in a continuous length. The coil of paper was to move a certain distance—the length of the negative, in fact—and then to pause; when a flat pad, carried at the end of a lever beneath the paper, was to rise up and press the latter flatly and tightly against the negative. When the exposure had been made the clamping device, as it was called, fell back, and permitted the paper to travel another short distance to bring a fresh unexposed surface beneath the negative, when the same cycle of operations was repeated.

When Acres brought his sketch to Paul, the latter was wrestling with the problem of photographing objects in motion. It was imperative to perfect a camera in order to defeat the machinations of the Americans bent upon the capture of the English film market. In this task, however, the most satisfactory means of securing intermittent motion was the stumbling block. He thought for a time that Acres’s ingenious method of printing bromide prints might offer a clue. Being a mechanical engineer, Paul recognised the inefficiency of Acres’s ideas as far as its application to cinematography was concerned, because the clamping device was not actuated by a positive drive. But the rough drawing which Acres had made of his bromide printing process set Paul thinking, and gave birth in the end to an entirely different project.

His efforts were accelerated by the tactics of Maguire and Baucus, and it was not long before he produced a camera working with an intermittent motion. With this camera some excellent films were obtained, and in the first instance these were employed with the Kinetoscope. The purchasers of the Paul machines consequently experienced no difficulty whatever in getting all the films they wanted, and the American product was ignored. It was not comparable with the English films in excellence or variety, and Maguire and Baucus retired from the scene completely discomfited. The attempt to obtain possession of the English market was a dismal failure owing to the unexpected enterprise of Robert Paul.

Paul had already attempted to apply the principle governing the operation of the Kinetoscope to the projection of a picture upon the screen. He had contrived a special lantern through which the film was run continuously, the revolution of the shutter serving to cut out each picture on the film, and throw it individually upon the sheet, thereby bringing it into a stationary position for a minute fraction of a second. But the projecting efforts were somewhat disheartening. The illusory effect was produced; but the picture was so faint as to render the result of no commercial value. The conditions attending the watching of the pictures at a range of about six or eight inches, as in the Kinetoscope, and at one of ten times as many feet, when thrown upon a whitened wall or screen, were vastly different. The shutter had to revolve at such a rapid rate to prevent blurring that a sufficient volume of light could not be passed through each picture in the short interval the shutter was open—less than 1/1,000th of a second—so the resultant image was faint and ill-defined.

It was evident that the film would have to be brought momentarily, by some means or other, into a fixed position behind the lens, so as to enable sufficient light to pass through to the screen, to yield a picture comparing with that of a slide projected from a magic lantern; and, further, that the picture would have to be moved during its eclipse by the shutter, in order to allow the next image to be brought into place. In other words, instead of the film moving forwards continuously, it would have to advance with a jerky or intermittent motion while the shutter was passing across the lens, and cutting off the light from the screen.

Paul concentrated his energies upon this problem. It was by no means a simple undertaking, for there were no previous efforts in the same direction to assist him. The great point was how to bring successive pictures into position before the lens. He thought out a clamping device, which is known as the “gate,” and which he attached behind the lens. This gate was formed of two parts, one fixed and the other having a swinging or opening movement. The fixed part was pierced with an aperture which could be reduced by a sliding diaphragm. The aperture of the second part was of the same shape and dimensions as the picture on the film. The film was wound on a spool, and from this it passed through the gate and thence over a sprocket, the teeth of which engaged with the perforations in the edge of the celluloid band.

The sprocket had to move intermittently, in such a way that a length of film corresponding to the depth of a picture was drawn through the gate at each movement, while the shutter momentarily cut off the light, otherwise there would have been a confusion of two consecutive pictures projected at the same time. How this movement was evolved is described in Chapter VII. It seems a simple task, but it proved exasperatingly difficult to secure accuracy, smoothness of motion, and the steadiness of the picture when thrown on the screen.

About three o’clock one morning, in the early months of 1895, the quietness of Hatton Garden was disturbed by loud and prolonged shouts. The police rushed hurriedly to the building whence the cries proceeded, and found Paul and his colleagues in their workshop, giving vent to whole-hearted exuberance of triumph. They had just succeeded in throwing the first perfect animated pictures upon a screen. To compensate the police for their fruitless investigation, the film, which was 40 feet in length and produced a picture 7 feet square, was run through the special lantern for their edification. They regarded the strange spectacle as ample compensation, and had the satisfaction of being the first members of the public to see moving pictures thrown upon the screen.

In February, 1896, the first public demonstration with this projection apparatus, described as the “Theatrograph,” was given at the Finsbury Technical College, and it caused a thrill of excitement and interest. A few days later, on February 28th, 1896, the apparatus was shown in the library of the Royal Institution. Again it stirred enthusiasm, and Mr. Robert Paul was congratulated warmly upon the success of his work by many of the leading British scientists of the day. This was the first demonstration of animated photography before a scientific institution in Great Britain. The films displayed were those which had been taken by the patient experimenter and his collaborators for the Kinetoscope, and included, among other things, a “Shoeblack at work in a London street,” and of “A Rough Sea at Dover.”

The fact that the display was given before one of the foremost scientific bodies in the world stamped it as being a development of signal importance. The interest it created was universal. Among those who saw the demonstration was Lady Harris, the wife of the famous impresario, Sir Augustus Harris, who evinced the keenest enthusiasm in the apparatus, and who plied the experimenter with searching questions as to how the apparent animation was obtained.

Next morning Paul received an urgent invitation from Sir Augustus Harris to join him at breakfast. The latter had heard from Lady Harris all about the remarkable exhibition at the Royal Institution, and, with a showman’s keen instinct, desired to glean further details without delay. He said that he had heard in Paris of a French invention similar to Paul’s. This took the English experimenter by surprise, for he had been labouring in absolute ignorance that other men were at work in the same field. However, the impresario was on business bent. He saw the possibilities of the Theatrograph as a form of amusement, and Paul was asked if he were willing to permit its being exploited at Olympia, which Harris had acquired.

“Well, I don’t know,” rejoined the experimenter. “I have no idea of its value from the public point of view.” He thought that the indifference of the British public to the Kinetoscope did not augur well for the new development.

“Now look here,” continued Sir Augustus Harris. “It won’t draw the public for more than a month. They soon get tired of these novelties. Are you prepared to come in on sharing terms, say, 50 per cent. of the receipts? Do you agree?”

Paul was somewhat doubtful of the results, but he acquiesced, and the agreement was drawn up there and then. The sequel showed how ill-founded his apprehensions had been. The Theatrograph caught the popular fancy, and proved the most powerful amusement-magnet at Olympia. It was the first picture palace in the world, that is to say, the first establishment devoted exclusively to the projection of moving pictures as a complete entertainment. From it the whole modern development of cinematography may be said to have sprung.

Indeed, it is difficult to realise the effect produced upon the world at large, through the skill and industry of Robert W. Paul. So far as Great Britain is concerned, he certainly fathered the enterprise of animated photography, as is evidenced by the fact that in British cinematographic circles he is known popularly as “Daddy Paul.” The lapse of time has not effected any essential change in the construction of the apparatus. The camera and projector as used to-day are fundamentally the same as those Paul first employed. Modifications have been made in details of the mechanism, but they are of slight importance. When the outcry against the danger of the cinematograph was raised in the early days of the industry, as a result of the fire at the Charity Bazaar in Paris, it was found that Paul had realised the danger and had endeavoured to guard against it, though his idea, being somewhat premature, was disregarded at the time.

The success of the “Theatrograph” at Olympia caused a wholesale demand for the new marvel. People wanted to attach the device to existing magic lanterns, so that animated pictures could be produced upon the screen whenever desired. Paul still cherished such little faith in his invention that he sold the projector attachment for the small sum of £5 ($25), and it could be fixed to any lantern. He was inundated with orders from all parts of the world. Many enthusiasts acquired a complete projecting outfit, the price of which at that time was about £80 ($400). The capacity of the workshop in Hatton Garden proved quite inadequate to the demand. The men worked night and day turning out the projecting apparatus, and the sale aggregated several hundreds sterling per week during the years 1896 and 1897. Provincial showmen lost no time in acquiring the novelty, or arranged with the inventor to provide such an item in their programmes. Within a short time twenty machines were being operated under Paul’s personal direction in the provinces.

London was by no means backward in following up the development. The first to introduce moving pictures to a metropolitan vaudeville audience was Mr. Moul, the energetic manager of the Alhambra Theatre. Like Sir Augustus Harris, however, he regarded it merely as a nine-days’ wonder, and did not think that the sensation it had created could be sustained for more than a week or so, which shows how even the most astute showman may sometimes err in gauging the public taste, and also parenthetically the professional estimation of the idea. An arrangement was made whereby Paul undertook to give a display with the “Animatograph”—this name had been substituted for the original “Theatrograph”—at the Alhambra Theatre, for a fortnight from March 25th, 1896. According to the terms of the contract, if the display proved popular, it was to be prolonged upon the same terms until moving pictures fell from public favour. That engagement of fourteen days grew into one of four years! For over 1,000 nights Paul personally superintended his moving pictures at the Alhambra; and then retired only because of pressure of work in other directions. Of course, other music halls in the metropolis acquired the apparatus. Operators were scarce, and they could not be trained rapidly enough to meet the demand. As a rule, men manipulating the limelight in the theatres were found to be the most suitable for the purpose, and they readily accepted an opportunity to earn £4 ($20) per week for a few minutes’ work every day. Times have changed since then, and to-day operators can be secured for about half that sum as weekly wage.

At one time in the early days Paul had no less than eight theatres in London demanding his personal attendance, involving a nightly journey of twenty miles. It is significant of the tremendous enthusiasm that was aroused by the moving pictures that the managers of the various halls had to arrange their programmes to suit the convenience of the operator, so that there might be no interference with his carefully prepared time-table of his evening’s movements from one place to another.

The exigencies of the manufacture of apparatus and films became at last of such a character that Paul found the strain of operating to be intolerable, so he retired from active work in the projecting world. His film manufacturing business attained considerable proportions, and this was continued until the latter part of 1908, when he abandoned all active participation in the industry he had initiated, to devote himself to his work on precision instruments for electrical measurements. His association with cinematography to-day is very slight, being confined mostly to collaboration with eminent physicists and scientists in illustrating scientific subjects by the aid of motion photography.

The Cinematograph.

While Robert W. Paul was busy in his laboratory, problems identical with his own were engaging the attention of French experimenters, and notably of Messrs. Lumière and Sons, of Paris and Lyons, a firm famous in the manufacture of photographic apparatus, dry plates, and paper, whose efforts to solve the problem of natural colour photography are well known to the world. Their attention, like Paul’s, was first directed to this new field by the Kinetoscope, which made its appearance in France about 1893. Messrs. Lumière instantly realised its drawbacks and limitations, the greatest of which, from their point of view, was the fact that the long ribbon of instantaneous pictures was visible to one person only. Then again they considered the number of pictures shown per second—thirty—to be too high.

They sought to devise an apparatus operating with an intermittent action, whereby a short length of film corresponding to the depth of a picture was jerked into position behind the lens while the light was eclipsed by the shutter, and afterwards to project the same pictures by a similar mechanism.

With the Kinetoscope as a basis they set to work, and, by means of a reciprocating motion given to a hook frame under the movement of a triangular piece of mechanism, they succeeded in stopping and starting the film alternately with such a degree of nicety that the successive sections of film were brought into position before the lens without damaging the guiding perforating holes or films. This constituted the salient feature of the Lumière device and the fundamental principle of the patent.

The Lumière camera was distinctly ingenious, simple and positive in its action, as well as being light and compact. The mechanism whereby the film was jerked down sufficiently after each exposure to bring another section of sensitised surface before the lens, may be likened to two projecting fingers which engaged with a hole on either side of the film. These two pins, or hooks, by the revolving action of a triangular eccentric, were brought forward towards the film and engaged with the perforations. When the shutter swung across the lens, thus cutting off the light, this pair of fingers dropped down, smartly jerking the film with them. The latter was then gripped and held firmly in position during the next exposure, when the two fingers withdrew from the perforations, rose sharply upwards, and clutched the film once more by the next pair of perforations.

While the Lumière experimenters adopted the width of film used in the Kinetoscope and secured pictures of the same dimensions, yet they made an important deviation from Edison’s idea. Instead of making four perforations per picture on either side of the film at regular intervals, they made just one round hole on each side of the image. These perforations were placed 20 millimetres—approximately 4/5 inch—apart. The reason for this deviation from the Edison method was that they had refrained from the use of toothed sprockets such as Edison and Paul had adopted, and which had to mesh with the film so as to feed it regularly and steadily forward before the lens in both the camera and the projector. From the mechanical point of view theirs was a preferable method, inasmuch as the comparative closeness of the perforations in the Edison gauge somewhat weakens the strength of the film, and can easily result in tearing.

There is every reason to believe that Messrs. Lumière were in ignorance of the efforts of Paul, in just the same way as the British investigator was oblivious of the work of the Frenchmen. In France the Kinetoscope failed, as it did in England and the United States. From the French point of view a unique opportunity existed to establish a new industry; accordingly they manufactured several films upon their principle.

The original bands of pictures were 17 metres—nearly 56 feet—in length. Unfortunately for the Lumière firm, the Kinetoscope had, thanks to Paul, been purchased more generally than was at first thought possible; while Paul had marketed in England a considerable number of films carrying the Edison standard perforation. The result was that they could not dispose of their films to people who were already possessed of the moving picture machine, and who demanded films of the Edison gauge. Messrs. Lumière ultimately abandoned the single perforation on either side of the picture in favour of that which had come into vogue through the Kinetoscope and the work of Paul.

The early Lumière projector was very interesting. Realising the high inflammability of the celluloid film, and the intense heat produced by the focussing of the electric arc light through the condenser upon the film, the experimenters sought to remove the danger of fire by counteracting the heat production of the rays of light. A spherical bottle, filled with water, was placed between the electric arc and the lens to act as condenser, Fig. 4. The bottle B was encased in a metal cylinder E, fixed to the front of the lantern A by four rods, each terminating in a screw V. The metal cylinder E was continued forwards in the form of a tube F, the end of which was fitted with a hinged shutter G carrying a small piece of ground glass H. When the film was set in motion this hinged shutter was lifted and laid back upon the top of the tube to which it was attached.

The spherical bottle, which was filled with distilled water to which a few drops of acetic acid were added, acted in exactly the same way as the glass condenser of to-day. But it possessed this advantage. The luminous rays were concentrated, and there was no loss of luminous light; only the heat rays were absorbed almost entirely by the water. Another beneficial result was that the light thrown through the picture, and thence on to the screen, was whiter, because the condenser glass is greenish, and imparts that tint to the light passing through it.

In the course of about 30 or 40 minutes the water under the action of the heat rays commenced to boil, but no inconvenience resulted. A piece of coke D, attached to a short length of wire C, was suspended in the decanter and placed just below the surface of the water, thus causing it to boil with complete evenness; there was no spurting of the contents, and no bubbling to interfere with the light. If the sphere of water were removed or broken during the operation of the lantern, as the condensation of the light rays immediately ceased there was no danger of the film being set alight. It may be pointed out, in passing, that Edison introduced a bulb of alum water between the electric lamp and the film as a heat absorbent in his Kinetoscope.

Although highly efficient, this expedient possessed certain drawbacks, and consequently in the course of time it was superseded by the glass condenser. Mechanical ingenuity succeeded in devising a means of minimising the danger of combustion or provided some method of smothering it in its incipient stage.

Although the Lumière invention proved a great success in France, and was the first commercial apparatus produced in that country, it did not get a foothold in Great Britain, owing to the contemporaneous work of Paul. The Lumière apparatus was a well-built mechanism, typical of French workmanship, but if anything rather too light for general wear and tear. It was introduced to the English public by Professor Treuwé, the famous French conjurer, at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1896, but failed to provoke a sensation, because Paul’s “Theatrograph” had already been seen at Olympia and held first place in public esteem. On the other hand, it created widespread interest in the United States, where, at the time of its arrival, projection upon the screen was unknown. Paul’s machine had not penetrated to North America, because the British market demanded his whole attention. It is a curious irony of fate that, although animated photography was first made possible in America by the ingenuity of an American inventor, and the only films then available were the product of the Edison “Black Maria” at Orange, yet it was a French apparatus which laid the foundations of the cinematograph industry in the United States. The product of Messrs. Lumière was introduced mainly through the enterprise of one man, Mr. Richard G. Hollaman, the energetic president of the Eden Musée Company.

Mr. Hollaman saw the Kinetoscope at the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of 1893, but as it was crude and did not arouse great enthusiasm, he took no especial interest in it. In the following year, however, he acquired an improved Kinetoscope from Berlin, which had been made by the celebrated electrical engineering firm, Siemens and Halske. This machine was circular in shape, and showed the pictures in movement in much the same way as Edison’s contrivance. Two of the machines were installed in the Eden Musée and remained there for six months. At the end of that time they were abandoned for the reason that no new films could be obtained.

In the spring of 1896 an exhibition was given in a shop in Park Row, New York City. In this instance the pictures were thrown upon the screen. The machine had been devised and built by an experimenter named Latham, but it was exceedingly faulty. The pictures shown depicted two prize fighters, but the images vibrated so violently on the screen, and were so scratched and imperfect, that the eyes of spectators were subjected to a fearful strain, and the apparatus was commercially valueless. Mr. Hollaman sought out the inventor with a view to the perfection of the device for his theatre, but learned that lack of capital prevented Latham from perfecting his apparatus.

A little later the president of the Eden Musée received a communication from a firm named Raff and Gammon. They offered him the State rights for a moving picture machine which had been designed by Edison, and of which they were empowered to dispose on his behalf. They invited Mr. Hollaman to a demonstration at Koster and Bial’s theatre, where they threw a picture upon the screen which measured about 10 feet in width by 6 feet in depth. Mr. Hollaman has told me that he recalled very vividly two of the films he saw there. One depicted “Mammy washing her child,” while the other was “The Gardener playing the Hose.” Both these films were made by Lumière and Sons at Lyons.

In the autumn of 1896 the Lumière apparatus appeared in the United States. It was introduced by Mr. Hurd, acting as agent for the French manufacturers, and this was the first practical cinematograph apparatus to be seen in North America. A demonstration was given, and Mr. Hollaman, realising the tremendous strides it represented in the projection of moving pictures, made a contract for its installation at the Eden Musée. The picture thrown on the screen by this projector measured 22 by 16 feet. From the day the “Cinematographe” was first shown to the public in the Eden Musée in 1896, it has constituted a permanent feature of the place. In fact, Mr. Hollaman has been the pioneer of all developments in the field of cinematography in North America. The French machines had been in use for some time, when Lumière’s agent, who had let them out on lease, suddenly called in all the projectors and retired from active operations in the United States. Another machine had to be secured for the Eden Musée, and for three months a Joli instrument was used, followed by an American apparatus operated by its maker, Eberhard Schneider.

Another change was made in September, 1897, when Mr. Charles Urban, now identified with Kinemacolor, but at that time acting as salesman for Maguire and Baucus, who had endeavoured in vain to oust Paul in London and who had retired from the scene after meeting with failure, approached the Eden Musée with a new projector, which was installed. Some time later Urban introduced a new machine which he had made himself, and as it possessed several improvements it was adopted. This was the first “Bioscope,” as it was called, that was ever shown to the public.

Shortly afterwards Maguire and Baucus, in company with Urban, left the United States for London, to establish an English cinematograph firm under the name of the Warwick Trading Company. In 1900 Mr. Hollaman secured the services of Frank Cannock, an expert operator and mechanician, for his cinematograph department, which had now become of paramount importance; and since that date the latter has manufactured all the machines required by the Eden Musée.

I have given a brief outline of the most interesting chapter in the story of cinematography, the epoch in which experimenters in different countries were struggling to perfect the same idea, independently of one another, and by different methods. Several other investigators were engaged in the quest, but their work was not of such importance as that of Edison, Paul, or Lumière. The first evolved the crude idea, and the latter two, in their respective countries, produced successful apparatuses entirely different from one another. The work of Robert Paul should command the greatest appreciation; for the Bioscope, which amuses the multitude from morning to night every day between the two Poles, is fundamentally the same as that which he introduced to the theatrical world for the first time on March 25th, 1896.