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LIVING PICTURES AND PEEP SHOWS 9
few years the Biograph company became a substantial enterprise.
Edison patented his invention in the United States, but, regarding it as an unimportant plaything, refused to spend the few hundred dollars necessary to obtain foreign patents, and when his kinetoscope was exhibited abroad, Europeans were free to imitate it or to produce machines inspired by it. Robert Paul, in London, Lumiere in Paris, and several other men in Europe soon made peep-show cabinets and cameras, and presently they began to export films to America. Lumiere called his device the "cinematograph," and from that day the word "cinema" has been used in Europe to describe motion pictures.
The phonograph and kinetoscope parlors were now joined by another form of show shop — store-rooms from which windows and doors had been removed, or set back, the wide, entrance hospitably inviting passers-by to enter and enjoy the marvels of talking machines and animated pictures. Usually the entrance was decorated with garish, circus-like posters, and a mechanical piano or a giant music-box assisted a leather-lunged barker in advertising the entertainment. Pennies replaced nickels as the price and these show-shops became known as "penny arcades." Millions of pennies poured into the arcades and parlors; numerous men acquired snug profits by operating this new type of amusement house and by placing cabinets in billiard-rooms, shooting-galleries, cigar stores, railway stations and other places where people idled time away.
Soon the notion was born that if animated pictures could be taken from the cabinet and shown on a large curtain or screen, a new and profitable entertainment field would be discovered. This idea called for the invention of a projection machine which would have to be something more elaborate and more intricate than any magic lantern or the whirling spools of the kinetoscope. The strip of film would have to be moved forward to precisely the right point; then it must be stopped while an electric light back of it projected the picture through a lens to a screen; then it must move forward again, the moving and stop