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THE ACTUAL
which brought the film into being, is precisely the opposite to the aim of the present-day producer, who attempts to supplement his visual images with their recorded sounds. This astonishing fact is worth serious consideration. The visual film was thought necessary to accompany the sound record. Fifty years later, sound is deemed necessary to accompany the visual film. . . .
Edison's first efforts apparently resulted in pictures of microscopic size in spirals upon a cylinder, somewhat similar to the early gramophone record. Some time later, strips of film were made out of collodion and experiments were also carried out with celluloid, but it was not until samples of the first Eastman-Kodak film, constructed on a nitro-cellulose base, were obtained by Edison in 1889 that the original cinema machine came into being. This was called the Kinetoscope. Experiments proceeded in Edison's laboratory at West Orange, until at length it was possible for one person at a time to look through the peephole of the machine and to see a series of pictures, some fifty feet in length, representing a person in movement -jerky and interrupted, perhaps, but nevertheless movement. It is said that the first actual cinematic record was that of a sneeze, performed by an assistant in the laboratory, one Fred Ott, whose name surely will go down to posterity on this account alone. Mr. Ott's sneeze is symbolical of the contagious influence of the film business.
In 1894 the Edison kinetoscope was presented commercially to the New York public and hundreds of these machines were sold in the open market. The subjects of Edison's films made at his laboratory were chiefly boxing-matches, dances, and variety turns, all of which were suitable to show off the capabilities of the new invention on account of their movement. But the limitation of these films being viewed by only one person at a time gave rise to a demand for a machine like a magic lantern, which would project the pictures on to a screen so that they could be seen by a whole roomful of people. Edison, however, disliked the proposal, believing that collective showings would rapidly exhaust the market, and he omitted even to patent his device in foreign countries.
Meanwhile, other experiments were in progress in Europe, all of them aiming at a combination of Edison's kinetoscope with the magic lantern, for the projection of the film on to a screen. A year later, in 1895, Woodville Latham gave public demonstrations in America
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