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HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
phantoscope, which is simply a fanciful name for the various devices I have employed in this work — the different steps of which may readily be followed by an inspection of the old apparatus now on exhibition in the United States National Museum.
"My active efforts were begun in 1890. Of course, first of all, pictures were to be secured. The first apparatus built for this purpose consisted of a ratchet-rotated drum, upon which the film was wound to feed it past the point of exposure. The camera made a succession of pictures upon this film by short exposures — the film being jerked forward the width of one picture in the interim. Two shutters were supplied — one with a narrow opening employed when the apparatus was used as a camera, and the other having an opening three-fourths of the complete circumference of the disk employed in reproducing the pictures. The amount to cut away in the shutter was determined wholly by experiment. The film was wound upon the drum intermittently by a pawl and ratchet arrangement. In reproducing the pictures, an oil lamp was used to project them upon a small screen. By accident the camera was found to be scr constructed that it would take pictures without a shutter.
"This seems at first glance incredible, but as the film gets only just sufficient exposure during the period of rest, the light is too weak to affect it during the movement of the film, for if five pictures per second were made and the exposure exceeded by fifteen times, the time necessary to move the unexposed portion; of the film into position, and the period of exposure should be just sufficient to make a fully timed picture, then the remaining one-three-hundredth part of a second would be too small to perceptibly affect the film and a shutter would be unnecessary.
"In these early experiments, the film was not perforated. At this time, the manufacturers did not keep a stock of film of any widths in considerable lengths. This convenience came later. So the longest film obtainable was split in the widths of about two and a half inches by drawing wide film beneath knives set in a board."
This first exhibition at Richmond, Indiana, could not be properly termed a public exhibition, as no admission fee was charged, but he followed this with a public exhibition in August, 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. So incredulous were the people at the exposition that less than one hundred perls