We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF WIDE FILMS CARL LOUIS GREGORY*
It has been claimed that there is only one standard of measurement which is common to all nations of the earth. That measurement is the width of a piece of standard theatrical size motion picture film.
Many persons actively engaged in the industry seem to be unaware that other widths and dimensions of film were ever used and some even believe that the use of wide film is a recent invention.
History moves in cycles and recent events in the use of wide film of various gauges show that we are in the midst of a repetition of the unstandardized efforts and struggles that marked the work of so many of the early pioneers of the industry.
To those who have never had occasion to refer to the early history of the motion picture it may come as a surprise that scores of scientists, mechanics, and inventors in nearly every civilized country were working simultaneously during the 90 's to perfect a system for taking and showing motion pictures. While they were all, in the main, working along the same lines, yet each adopted whatever width of film seemed to him to be best suited for his experiments.
That the 35 mm. width of film came to be the measurement which survived and eventually became standardized is, so far as the writer has been able to ascertain, a coincidence. It was not foresight that caused Mr. Edison in this country and Lumiere Freres in France to select film widths that were so nearly the same that they were practically interchangeable. It was pure chance, also, that these two firms happened to be the most powerful commercially in their respective countries.
Edison selected !3/8 inches as the width of film best suited for his Kinetoscope only after a long series of experiments with films in cylinders, disks, and narrow ribbon form run horizontally instead of vertically.
This measurement coincides within l/m of an inch with the 35 mm. width selected by Lumiere and, while Lumiere used only one round
* 76 Echo Ave., New Rochelle, N. Y.
27