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LIVING PICTURES AND PEEP SHOWS 23
became friends they did a lot of reading and walking and thinking and talking together. The earliest screen shows, coming at a time when they had no stage engagements, received their earnest attention, and, soon convinced that this form of entertainment possessed almost unlimited possibilities, they searched for ways and means of engaging in the alluring new business.
One day in 1897, Blackton went over to the Edison laboratory in New Jersey to do a newspaper story, with pictures, about the inventor, and before the interview ended Edison had agreed to sell him a projector and an outfit of films for eight hundred dollars. This was a huge sum of money for the two young men — each was about twenty years old — to raise, and they had to beg and borrow to get it; but they got it, and gave living-picture exhibitions in theaters and halls in neighborhoods and cities in which screen shows had not been opened.
Merely showing pictures did not satisfy them very long. Their heads were full of ideas of pictures they would like to photograph, but no cameras were for sale or for rent. They talked and thought, and thought and talked, and one day Albert Smith made the discovery that the projection machine could be transformed into a camera — if he could invent several devices to make it work properly. He invented the devices, the projector became a camera, and Smith and Blackton were able to photograph film.
Under the title of "Vitagraph," they became producers of motion pictures, photographing street parades, news incidents, prize fights, dramatic episodes — any subject that would interest screen patrons without involving the film-makers in too much expense of production. Albert Smith's inventive mind kept at work and evolved various improvements of the projecting machine as well as the camera. Vitagraph had abundant energy and imagination, but it needed more capital to permit expansion.
In these years, Harlem was "way uptown," a district of quiet, home-loving German and American families. One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was its business center, and on this street was a billiard and pool hall operated by William Rock, a cheer