Film Weekly year book of the Canadian motion picture industry (1951)

maintains the Museum in what was formerly the inventor’s laboratory, with Norman R. Speiden as curator. The letter was obtained years ago from the son of one of the Hollands by Col. John A. Cooper, chairman of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association at the time. This gentle¬ man, now in his 80’s and retired for some years, carried on research into the history of the Canadian motion picture industry when few were interested in it. That was second nature to him, for he was at one time editor of the Canadian Magazine and the founder of the Cana¬ dian Club 56 years ago. The Hollands were recognized as ac¬ tive and enterprising men in the Ottawa of their day. They were publishers and booksellers and were listed in the Ot¬ tawa City Directory of 1892-93 as Senate Reporters, Stenographers, Agents for the Smith Premier Typewriter, Edison Phonograph and the Sorley Storage Battery. Their business address was 34 Elgin Street and their telephone was No. 12. Perhaps a fuller search into their backgrounds will be made one of these days. Their rightful place in mo¬ tion picture history has never been ap¬ preciated in their own country, for until recently it was the impression that the letter Edison wrote them referred only to the first showing of his Kinetoscope in Canada. dPHOMAS ALVA EDISON’S family background is much the same as that of countless Americans and Cana¬ dians. His life, like the lives of his an¬ cestors on this continent, reflects the urge for vigorous self-assertion which was and is characteristic of the peoples of the United States and Canada — a quality to which each nation owes its greatness. In “Edison, the Man and His Work,” published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York in 1926, George S. Bryan referred to one of the inventor’s ancestors, Thomas Edison, and went on to say: “In the days of the American Revolu¬ tion, this Thomas was for the Contin¬ ental cause, and John, Thomas’ son, was as stoutly Loyalist. After the Revo¬ lution, John, like many other Loyalists, emigrated to Canada; first to Nova Scotia, then in 1811 by ox-team, pioneer fashion, to Bayfield in Upper Canada, as the British government was making liberal grants of land. John Edison re¬ ceived a tract of six hundred acres and went to occupy it. Later, he moved again — this time to a place named Vienna, near the Northern shore of Lake Erie.” John Edison’s son, Samuel, was born in Digby, Nova Scotia in 1804. Samuel, the father of the inventor, joined the forces of William Lyon Mackenzie dur¬ ing the Rebellion of 1837. A captain, he fled to the United States, as did Mack¬ enzie, when the Rebellion became a lost cause. He went to Detroit and in 1842 moved to Milan, Ohio. There, on Febru¬ ary 11, 1847, Thomas Alva Edison was born. The first job held by the 16-year-old Edison, who had learned the telegraph¬ er’s craft, was as night operator for the Grand Trunk at Stratford, Ontario. There he completed his first invention. Disturbed in his studies by the need of a periodic call-in, he created an auto¬ matic report signal. Stratford, incidentally, is but 47 miles from Brantford, where Alexander Gra¬ ham Bell made his historic telephone experiment. Years later one of Edison’s great inventions was a transmitter which made the telephone speak louder and led toward the discovery linked most with his name and fame, the phonograph. It has been suggested that the phonograph led him to the moving picture, since he felt that such a novelty would sell many more of the voice in¬ struments if connected with it. Thomas Alva Edison died in 1931. In 1922 he had written in his diary: “I consider that the greatest mission of the motion picture is first to make people happy ... to bring more joy and cheer and wholesome good will into this world of ours. And God knows we need it.” pANADA has kept pace with the ^ United States in cultivating public taste for the motion picture and has, since the first days, shared in its every new triumph. A nation of moviegoers, our land is studded with theatres, among them several that rank with the finest in the world. Because of its vast spaces and relatively small population the Itinerant exhibitor still travels through rural areas showing films wherever a crowd can be gathered. As population is added to a community a place of exhibition is reserved for regu 23