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LIVING PICTURES AND PEEP SHOWS 17
parlors, and dime museums were the real devotees of movies. They could not see them often enough, and they wandered from one place to another, searching for films they had not seen before.
A new class of amusement buyers sprang into existence as quickly and apparently as magically as screen pictures themselves had appeared. In the cities in which show rooms had been opened, scores of thousands, swelling to hundreds of thousands, of men, women, and children daily and nightly appeared at ticket windows. From suburban and country towns were coming many calls for apparatus and films. Nothing comparable to the movement had ever happened before, and no one had anticipated or prepared for its advent.
Exhibitors, excited by incredible prospects of making money, exerted themselves to the utmost to rent or buy more projectors and films, and to obtain other and larger rooms to accommodate the picture-hungry masses. They could rent more halls and store rooms, but there were so few manufacturers of projection machines and producers of pictures that all of them together had not enough facilities to meet the ever-increasing demand. The youthful industry, with no experience or traditions to guide it, with insufficient machinery to satisfy the sudden, astonishing desire of the public — even without tools to build the machinery — and with no internal or external organization to give it direction or cohesion, was forced by the populace into a maelstrom of expansion that is without counterpart in business history.
Prior to the transformation of moving pictures to the screen, not many films of fifty-foot length were needed to supply the peepshows, and as there had been no urgent demand for cameras, very few had been invented. The early Edison photographic apparatus — a huge dark-room mounted on a circular track to enable the camera to follow the sun — served its purpose until living pictures stimulated Edison engineers to produce a portable machine. Biograph's camera was smaller than the original Edi