Cinematographic annual : 1930 (1930)

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184 CINEMATOGRAPHIC ANNUAL * Yi inch wide, besides the present standard established by Paul, Edison and Lumiere. "Henry V. Hopwood in 1899 described more than fifty different 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 of 35 mm., 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. Marey. 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 2]/i inches wide and \x/i 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 24 -inch high by 1 l/i 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 promoter, 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 11,000 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 eagerness 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