American cinematographer (Jan 1930)

January, 1930 American C i n a m a t o g r a p h e r Five 6arly History OF IFide Films Being a Peek into the Past that is Both Interesting and Enlightening By Carl Louis Gregory One of the most interesting papers read at the recent meeting of the S. M. P. E. was Mr. Gregory's article, an extract of which we are pleased to give our readers. EDITOR’S NOTE. I T HAS been claimed that there is only one standard of meas- urement 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 un- aware that other widths and dimensions of film were ever used and some even believe that the use of wide film is a recent in- Iwention. History moves in cycles and recent events in the use of the wide •film of various gauges show that we are in the midst of a repeti- tion 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 inistory 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 per- fect a system for taking and showing motion pictures and 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 [ois experiments. That the 35 mm. width of film came to be the measurement A'hich 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 -Yeres in France to select film widths that were so nearly the lame that they were practically interchangeable. It was pure rhance, also, that these two firms happened to be the most loowerful commercially in their respective countries. Edison selected 1 ^ inches as the width of film best suited for hais Kinetoscope only after a long series of experiments with films m cylinders, discs, and narrow ribbon form run horizontally in- I’.tead of vertically. This measurement coincides within 1/1000 of an inch with he 35 mm. width selected by Lumiere and while Lumiere used only one round perforation on each side of the film and Edison issed four rectangular ones it was possible by altering sprockets •tr by reperforating the Lumiere film to use them interchangeably. [.Lumiere later reluctantly abandoned the two-hole perforation and iiopied the Edison standard in order to sell film to users of Edison lachines. An advertisement in Hopwood’s “Living Pictures" edition of 1899 offers the “Prestwich” specialties for animated photog- raphy—“nine different models of cameras and projectors in three [izes for Ir^-inch, 1% -inch and -inch width of film." Half a Icozen other advertisers in the Lame book offer “cinemato- |rraphs“ for sale and while the lustrations show machines for |!lms obviously of narrow or ]fide gauge no mention is made Iff the size of the film. During 1899 there were in [ingland and on the Continent ilutograph films 2^ inches [yide, Demeny Chronophoto- ^raphe 60 mm. wide, Skladow- icy film 65 mm. wide, Prestwich ride film 2% inches wide, Bir- kac films 11/16 inch wide, Jun- Ur Prestwich Yi inch wide, be- Iddes the present standard estab- lished by Paul, Edison and Lu- iere. Henry V, Hopwood in 1899 described more than fifty dif- ferent models of projectors made by different manufacturers and gives the names of about seventy more. Curiously enough the size of film used in the various machines is mentioned only in two or three instances. It is probable that most of them used the Edison standard although it is obvious from the descriptions that many of them used other sizes. Probably the first example of motion picture “film” as it is photographed today was a scene taken in the Champs Elysees in Paris in 1886 by Dr. E. J. Matey. Although the “film” was paper, sensitized celluloid not being available until a year or two later, and cine projectors having not yet been invented; this paper negative could be printed as a positive film and run as a Fox Grandeur film today. In May, 1889, William Friese-Green, 92, Piccadilly, London, made a motion picture negative of a scene on the Esplanade, Brighton, England, using paper film negative lYi inches wide and 1 Yi inches height to each frame. 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 Loop which caused much patent litigation in the early days. Latham called his machine the Eidoloscope and used wide film 2 inches wide with frames Yu -inch high by 1 inches long. Oval holes cut through the frame line at each side alternately served to make electrical contact to light the arc each time the intermittent brought the picture to rest. This intermittent lighting of the arc served in place of a shutter but was not very successful as the electrical spring contacts scratched the film and the arc responded irregularly to the quick make and break. In the fall of 1897 Enoch J. Rector, an inventor and pro- moter, 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 1 1,000 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 eager- ness 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 polysyllablic name. Out of the hundreds of such coined trade names only a few are remembered today; such as Kinetoscope, Vitagraph, Bio- graph and Mutoscope. Subjects were confined almost entirely to news events, prize- fights, short scenic shots and theatrical or spectacular bits many of which were considered (Continued on Page 29)