We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
BELL (S HOWELL
FILMO TOPICS
Published monthly in the interests of personal motion picture makers by the Bell cV Howell Company, Chicago
Edwin A. Reeve . Editor
APRIL-MAY, 1932
VOLUME 8
NUMBERS 4 and 5
A Quarter Century of Leadership 1907 1932
IT WAS a cold shivery night in November, 1907, in a small Indiana village ... a village undecided as to whether it was to go back to the soil or grow into the industrial beehive which later it became.
On a grimy sheet of canvas against the side of a darkened building there raced the grotesque figures of foreign gentlemen and foreign ladies in a Louis Quinze bedroom set. The clickety-clack of a projection machine rattled down from the second story window across the way.
And what a crowd there was. standing on the cold paving! For as far as fifteen and twenty miles they had driven their rigs to see the pictures. The scenes were -Mange, the comedy very French, the photography poor, the projection terrific in its flickering and jumping. But we
St I there fascinated, and you could not
have budged a person in the crowd with less than the burning of Rome.
One little slice of provincial America was treating itself to a new amusement. Little
did it know the wretchedness of the performance. Ml it knew was that Life had
To po back to the earlier days of the movie industry, here's an old-time studio "still" of Mary Miles Minter facing the Moll & Howell camera
come to town. new. startling, intoxicating.
\\ e talk of the birth of the airplane at Kittyhawk. the birth of the steamboat up the Hudson, of the telephone and the radio down in New Jersey. But the movies were born in little villages and big villages in every corner ol \merica. where the
i apt fascination of the populace inspired a mechanical genius in Chicago to help give the people more of what they wanted,
and to improve the movies immeasurably in the process. This genius was Albert S. Howell.
It was just twenty-five years ago that Albert S. Howell and Donald Bell, both of whom had been improving the motion picture projectors <>f that time, incorporated to operate their own cinemachinery factory.
Then, the embryonic film industry was chaotic. Many were the widths of film, and many were the sizes and the positioning of perforation-. A nickelodeon entrepreneur could show, with his particular projector, only films ot our standard. The many of other standards could not flicker aero- fii screen. Now, thank to the standards set by Hell & Howell, the one accepted professional film can In shown in any theater in America, i es, and in anv theater in the world! And shown with a perfection in technique that make early cinema entertainments seem crude indeed.
Their previous work upon motion picture equipment had made evident to Mr. Howell and Mi. Bell the need for standardization in films. Willi tin need always in mind, the Bell & Howell Company built