Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1930-1949)

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536 ARTHUR S. NKWMAN [j. s. M. P. E. mechanism made by Pescheck, but I remember that the Pescheck movement was a modification of the Lumiere system. The next camera in my mind is that of Demeny. It employed a film considerably larger than that of Lumiere, and stands out in my mind because the intermittent movement was of the beater or dog form, and the mechanism was driven by pulling the film on a take-up spool, to which the driving handle was fixed. To this I will refer later. The Lumiere pictures came over from France, and a certain number of films were sold to those who possessed machines or to those who had made them, but the supply was quite inadequate. Immediately the Lumiere pictures were shown here, many mechanics went to work to make machines to project these pictures. All sorts of projecting machines were made and there was a rush to get Lumiere films. For some unexplained reason, however, few thought of making cameras, and those who did had difficulty in procuring film and also in perforating it. The Edison Kinetoscope which was a machine into which you looked and saw pictures moving under a magnifying glass, after a year or two of success, had fallen flat in the public mind, and large quantities of these pictures were in the second-hand market. These were eagerly bought by those who had made machines and the machines were altered to take the Edison perforation, which perforation was originally intended to run continuously on a large sprocket, and not designed to work intermittently as we now use it. The great bulk of the machines were consequently altered to the Edison gauge. When at last the demand for pictures increased, the camera makers made their instruments to deal with the perforation suitable for use in the projectors taking Edison gauge. The Edison Kinetoscope films were for the most part very dense ; it was difficult to get enough light through them, and having been photographed at the rate of 30 to 40 per second, they gave a moving picture certainly, but a very slowly moving picture. So great, however, was the public interest at the time, that a show having twelve pictures, each 75 feet long, could command money, and not only money but good money. I have seen a room not so big as this absolutely filled. You paid a shilling to go in and see half-an-hour of pictures and came out satisfied. The pictures were bad, jumping was bad due to the projectors being bad, the light was bad due to the density of the films. The usual thing was for the show to run a certain distance and then the picture would jump all over the place. The manager would come out and apologize