Films Facts and Forecasts (1927)

4 FILMS: FACTS AND FORECASTS picture-theatre, where 5,000 people at once can see the film. The next stage in the evolution of the film was carried out in Hatton Garden, London, where Robert W. Paul, by adapting Edison's device, conceived the idea of throwing the film on a screen. Paul did more. He realised the need for an intermittent movement in both his camera and his projector. Every little picture in the film must be held stationary for a fraction of a second so as to register an individual impression on the screen, and every one of the snapshots constituting the film in the camera must be taken separately. The present rate of exposure of the little pictures that make up the film is sixteen a second. Other inventors in America, Armat especially, were working on the principle, but Paul was the first actually to project satisfactorily a moving picture on the screen. That was in 1895, and being a man of foresight and intelligence he quickly turned the discovery to commercial advantage. There must be many still who remember his sensational theatrograph, exhibited at Olympia and the Alhambra in 1896. The Lumiere Brothers in Paris, also using the kinetoscope as a model, evolved their cinematographic machine about the same time, and by sending it to New York without delay, were literally responsible for the start of the American film-business. Everyone wanted to buy either a Paul or a Lumiere machine, and Paul worked so swiftly, turning out both the projector and the films, that, for a time, the British output was supreme. In the second phase of the film's development the evolution of the film-story begins. In the early days the producer was content to photograph topical events, horse-races, boxing-matches, and so on. No one attempted to stage a film-play, though Paul as early as