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T im ely T opics
'"p his year marks the fiftieth birthday of the motion picture industry — the fiftieth anniversary of the presentation of the first moving picture. As the industry prepares to celebrate its golden jubilee, those of us who are engaged in the phototechnical phases of that industry may well pause to consider for a moment how greatly the industry and all of us who work therein are indebted to film.
Today, film is a commonplace. It is the stuff we make our pictures on, and upon which we ship our shows to the world’s theatres. We use it; we know the characteristics of each type and have our individual favorites: but beyond that, we take film for granted as a natural and inevitable part of making moving pictures.
It was not always thus. Fifty-odd years ago, when Thomas Edison, his assistant W. K. L. Dickson, and others were trying to turn man’s age-old dream of living pictures into fact, film of any type, size, shape or quality was as earnestly sought after — and apparently as impossibly distant — as is atomic power today. Edison — and others before him — knew what film should do; what it should be like; how it should be used in making moving pictures. But they did not have it, and they did not know how to make or get it. They knew only that without it, motion pictures were an impossibility.
Nearly four thousand years ago the ancient Egyptians knew that a series of pictures of a moving object, each representing a slightly later phase of
movement would, if viewed rapidly and successively, blend together to give an illusion of motion.
Once photography had been invented and refined to the point where instantaneous exposures were possible, there remained only the mechanical problem of finding a way to bring into place, expose, remove a dozen or more light-sensitive surfaces per second in taking, and comparable operations with developed pictures in viewing, to make moving pictures possible.
The sole stumbling-block was the lack of suitable mechanical support for the pictures. Glass plates, which were universally used for photography at that time, would not do, for glass plates are bulky, heavy and breakable. Paper would not do, as it is not transparent.
Thus in 1887 all practical research toward motion pictures stood stalemated. waiting for somebody to invent an emulsion support which was light, flexible, durable and transparent.
That same year, the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin announced and patented his invention of celluloid-based photographic film, and the firm which is now' the Agfa-Ansco Corporation placed it on the market. Here at last was a negative material which was light, flexible, durable and transparent. Motion pictures were at last thoroughly practical !
To turn them into a practical fact was but the relatively simple matter of designing the necessary mechanical equipment to perform the operations of moving and exposing the film. We do not mean by this statement to de
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