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lecture of The Story of the Films. The other Lumiere mechanism was used as a printer to duplicate these early masterpieces and they were processed on the developing machine brought from Warwick Court.
Perhaps it was lucky for me, and for some scraps of posterity, that the idea of taking in other people's washing fizzled out and never came to anything, for hard circumstance forced us into attempts at film production and so started a business which afterwards became interesting. It happened something like this. We got together a small collection of such puerile efforts as those I have mentioned, made a little list of them and managed to sell some prints to fair-ground proprietors and others of that sort. Being young and keen, a very little encouragement served to fire our enthusiasm, and though most of our customers couldn't even sign their names and were wont to pay us in threepenny bits culled from the roundabouts and swings, they were absolutely honest and never cheated us for a penny. The exhibitors of a later date did not necessarily inherit this propensity.
And so we gradually went on to better things. I find that Henley Regatta of 1900 attracted our roving attention for seven scenes and that perhaps suggested the possibility of taking two or three 'scenics' on the upper Thames, punctuated with a river panorama of a Cornish mining village. Then we became patriotic and immortalised some modern warships and contrasted them with old sailing frigates used as training ships for the Navy.
Then around 1 901, we came to a definite milestone in the shape of the Phantom Rides which became tremendously popular about this time. These were panoramic pictures taken from the front of a railway engine travelling at speed. The South Western Railway Company whose line ran through a great deal of very beautiful scenery, especially in and around Devonshire, possessed some engines particularly suitable for this work in that they had long extensions between the front of the boiler and the buffers — iron platforms looking as though they had been made for a camera to be strapped upon. I approached them with the idea of gaining publicity for their line through a number of Phantom Rides and they agreed to put one of these engines at my disposal on certain sections and gave me a station-to-station pass all over their system for as long as was necessary to complete the arrangements.
But first I had to obtain a suitable camera — it was no use tackling that job in fifty-foot driblets and I determined to
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