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figure in about a dozen different positions which changed instantaneously from one to another. The interesting thing about it now is that the means of that quick movement was practically the same as the ' Maltese cross' movement of a modern film projector. If you can imagine a Maltese cross straightened out into a line with an ordinary pin wheel working it, and at the same time closing and opening a very rapid shutter, you will understand the 'Choreutoscope,' which was showing its crude pictures on the screen at the 'Poly' ten or fifteen years before anyone had a film to show. For it was in or about 1878 or 1879 when I saw it and it had been showing long before that.
It was intermittent movement which made the cinematograph possible. Many films had been made years before any of them could be projected on a screen. Here was the intermittent movement almost exactly as it is used today — and everybody overlooked it!
The Polytechnic stage was small but very well equipped for those days — no electric light, of course, but plenty of gas, Argand burners and so on, and limelight in the wings and perches. There were plenty of trap-doors including a star-trap through which a man could be shot up from below on to the stage and land on his feet on the spot he had just come through. 'Pepper's Ghost' was born in this theatre and later that very clever ghost illusion invented by J. J. Walker, the organ builder.
In this theatre there were daily lantern lectures, mildly educational but always entertaining, by such lecturers as B. J. Maiden, Professor Pepper and my own father, T. C. Hep worth, who were on the regular staff of the 'Poly.' And that is how it is that I was so frequently there and was able to gain an insight into the wonders of the operating box and the delights of the stage and all its contraptions behind and below. My litde mind became stored and almost clogged with details which were to serve me wondrously well in after years.
The crowning tragedy of my childhood was on the day when the Polytechnic was closed for ever and I could draw no further upon its riches.
It was about this time that the family migrated to a slightly larger house at 32, Gantelowes Road in the same neighbourhood. Here, fired with the stage enthusiasm inspired by the 'Poly,' we children fitted up the nursery as a theatre. There was a drop curtain of the proper roll-up-from-the-bottom type (not your
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