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Jan., 1930] EARLY HISTORY Otf WlDE FlI,MS 29
England, using paper film negative with frames 2x/2 inches wide and iy2 inches high. Later in the same year he used celluloid film displacing the paper used earlier.
One of the first to project successfully upon a large sized screen was Mr. Woodville Latham, inventor of the Latham Coop which caused much patent litigation in the early days. Latham called his machine the Eidoloscope and used film 2 inches wide with frames 3/4 inch high by lx/2 inches long.
In the fall of 1897, Enoch J. Rector, an inventor and promoter, showed pictures of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons prize fight in the Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York City. His apparatus was called the Veriscope and the same mechanism used to show the pictures was employed in the camera with which 11,000 feet of film were taken at Carson City, Nevada, March 17, 1897. Thereafter about twenty machines for projecting this large size film were manufactured and these fight films were exhibited all over the country.
In the late 90 's the motion picture was regarded as a great novelty which would soon die out. Conditions were chaotic and everyone who went into the business worked with frantic eagerness to reap the rich harvest before the fickle interest of the public should pass on to some new fancy. Just as there was no standard of film size, no rate of frames per second was established and the taking rate varied from 8 per second to 60 per second among the different systems, each of which was distinguished by some fantastic and polysyllabic name. Out of the hundreds of such coined trade names only a few, such as Kinetoscope, Vitagraph, Biograph, and Mutoscope, are remembered today.
Subjects were confined almost entirely to news events, prizefights, short scenic shots, and theatrical or spectacular bits many of which were considered very risque in those conservative days. The May Irwin Kiss, Little Egypt, Loie Fuller's Fire Dance, Bridget Serves Salad Undressed, and many others brought gasps of amazement at their audacity.
On November 3, 1899, the Jeffries-Sharkey fight was held at Coney Island at night. Wm. A. Brady, now well known in the theatrical and motion picture world, and a promoter named O'Rourke sponsored the bout and induced the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to film the fight. Wm. Bitzer, a cinematographer still on the staff of D. W. Griffith, had charge of the photography. Four hundred arc lights were hung over the ring. The film used