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62 THE INVENTION OF CELLULOID
Even before Desvignes and Coleman Sellers had taken their moving pictures on glass plates, the moving picture was yet another step nearer realisation. Alexander Parkes, a Birmingham chemist, had invented celluloid, though he called it Parkesite, while, in a factory at Foot's Cray in Kent, another manufactory of celluloid had come into being. Glass plates were clumsy and cumbersome both in the camera and in projection. The advent of celluloid would solve many of the pioneer moving picture makers' difficulties, though, for some time, they were to go on experimenting with plates and with films made of paper, apparently unaware of the possibilities of the new base.
The invention of the flexible transparent base for photographs by Parkes in 1854 preceded the introduction of celluloid by John Carbutt in America by thirty-four years. And, just as in subsequent years America found it hard to believe that John Baird had perfected television and run it successfully in cinemas before they had even become aware of its potentialities, and later scoffed at those in this country who claimed to have seen large screen television at the Coliseum Theatre in London's St. Martin's Lane in 1929 as obviously exaggerating, in Mark Twain's phrase, something which never happened, so, when it was established that the Englishman, William Friese Greene invented the cinematograph several years before Thomas Edison's first film machine, certain American writers disputed his claim with the triumphant assertion that he could not possibly have done so because celluloid was not available, being introduced by John Carbutt between 1888 and 1889. They did not realise that, like television, Britain had Parkesite long before America had celluloid for a film base.
Coleman Sellers and Wenham were, with their photographic moving pictures, ahead of the general trend in i860. For several years the moving picture continued to develop mainly along the lines of the Zoetrope. Pictures, drawn by artists, actuated on the principle of the turning of leaves, became popular toys possessing the essential Victorian scientific tinge and continued to be the vogue well into the early 'seventies. Their names, Linnett's Kineograph and the Pocket Kinetoscope, have a prophetic tinge in the light of events, which followed after.
The magic lantern, as a means of projecting moving pictures, came into vogue in 1870.
In forty years the moving picture had moved very slowly from the