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LIVING PICTURES AND PEEP SHOWS 13
trons, and word of mouth advertising brought such throngs of customers to arcades and parlors that within a few months the demand for projectors and films far exceeded the supply.
No other invention of the mechanical age had created such widespread astonishment and interest. Other inventions had as their prosaic objectives the saving of labor and time. Steam engines manufactured cloth, lumber, metal wares and many other articles, and reduced the hardships and delays of travel by land and sea; hundreds of machines had been invented to take the drudgery out of life, and had been accepted as matters of fact. The telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, were comparatively new marvels. Each had created a sensation, but they had not entered into the lives of millions of people. The common man and his family still used kerosene lamps; none but the well-to-do had telephones; and the telegram was a form of communication seldom known in the average household except to announce serious illness or death.
But this new thing — this "living picture" affair — was not a prosaic tool to reduce labor or to save time; it was not an instrument to create more comfort and luxury for the well-to-do. It was a romantic device to bring entertainment to the common people. Other inventions had made their way slowly, the public becoming accustomed to them so gradually that there was not much general astonishment-value in any of them. But screen shows burst into the world with startling success. People did not at first associate the little film in the penny-arcade cabinet with "life-size living pictures" on a theater curtain, and the motion picture came into existence as a novelty almost equal to a miracle.
The subjects of the early screen shows were substantially the same as those in the fifty-foot films of the peep-cabinets, but spectators devoured them ravenously. People walking along a street, a dancer doing her turn, prize-fighters at work, a girl trying on shoes — anything served to thrill the arcade and parlor patrons and to send them home happy. When a camera man first produced a picture of a railroad train rushing headlong