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LIVING PICTURES AND PEEP SHOWS 25
rising to prominence as manufacturers of instruments and producers of films, and all throughout Central Europe other manufacturers of machines and makers of pictures were actively working to gain standing in the industry. European theater-goers enjoyed the novelty of living pictures, but as no arcade halls and back rooms were opened as cheap show-shops, the masses abroad had little opportunity to become acquainted with the new amusement, and European manufacturers looked across the Atlantic for the principal market for their short films.
While the companies and individuals I have named were obsessed with the desire to make pictures, or to invent machines despite Edison's patents, scores of others were entering the business through the department of exhibition. Some of these were showmen who came from side-shows at circuses and county fairs and from small traveling dime museums, repertoire, and burlesque troupes. Some of them were ballyhoo artists and spielers who had become acquainted with country life in America through selling patent medicines from a buggy on small-town street corners, a gasoline torch supplying lighting effects, while the medicine vendor or his assistant drew the crowd with ventriloquism, magic, or songs.
Showmen of these classes were purveyors of novelties, real or alleged "genuine new novelties." They were perpetual wanderers, descendants in spirit of the mountebanks of previous centuries, and probably not one in a thousand of them ever had serious thoughts of settling down to the operation of a theater or any other business in one place. These men recognized in living pictures the novelty of their dreams. Here was the "quick clean-up" that would enable them to garner bushels of small coins, and their thoughts turned to exhibiting the new wonder in towns and villages where there were no music halls, parlors, and arcades. Anyone who could get a projection machine and a few films was sure of attracting throngs to small city theaters, town halls, lodge rooms, and country school houses. Some of