The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

of Science eluded "A Rough Sea at Dover," and "A Shoe Black at Work in a London Street." The late Sir Augustus Harris (one of the greatest showmen of the nineteenth century) heard of Paul's success and at once booked his exhibition for the London Olympia, where it opened on March 25, 1896. Meanwhile, Edison, of Orange, N. J., and the Lumieres, of Paris, were not idle. As recorded in previous volumes, the Latham Eidoloscope and the Edison Vitascope, two faulty — yet vastly superior to the Kinetoscope — devices, were first exhibited at Keith's Philadelphia Vaudeville Theatre under the management of Phillip F. Nash, now an officer of the United Booking Offices. Although the Edison films attracted the public fairly well in Philadelphia, there was little demand for either machine, and in the same year (theatrical season of 1895-96) the writer saw at Koster & Bial's, in New York (present site of Macy's stores) a still further development of the Edison device, again called "The Vitascope." The pictures as shown on the screen were of about one minute's duration; bulky, proportionless, and so imperfect photographically that wholly apart from the almost intolerable flickers there was considerable resentment expressed in the press, and it was here that "the chaser" became a byword with vaudeville people as meaning that the films were calculated to drive the audience out of the theatre when an exodus was desirable. While Paul was developing his many-titled apparatus, the Lumieres coincidentally, it is claimed, were laboring along the same lines. It is hard to say whether the French firm and the Englishman were being "tipped off" to each other's activities. When Sir