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8o THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
broken into vaudeville in London, presented as a further step a comic scene of a man watering with a hose in a garden, and a mischievous boy so managing things that the water squirted into the man’s face. . . . For the collection and correlation of these facts, I am indebted — as every other historian of the screen must forever be — to Terry Ramsaye, moving-picture journalist. While the pioneers were still alive, he spent years of painstaking and expensive investigation in getting for his Million and One Nights the exact truth about these early, obscure beginnings.
Then the screen took a timid step toward drama. May Irwin had just made a great success with The Widow Jones. In this comedy, John C. Rice kissed her long and unctuously while his partner in bliss talked out of the corner of her generous mouth. All America was talking of the May Irwin Kiss. Vitascope purchased from Miss Irwin the right to immortalize this bit on the film, and put out the product over the Orpheum circuit. The early projectors were so made that any scene could be at once repeated. And audiences in the vaudeville houses used to encore The Kiss six or seven times.
Adolph Zukor remembers that in 1905 or thereabout he saw the signs of the old Edison kinetoscope in Masonic Temple, entered, invested a nickel in a view of the new wonder. But it produced so little impression that he does not now remember what he saw. Then, in the period when he and Lottie Kaufmann were awaiting