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96 EDISON'S FAILURE
Within twelve months Paul had made a second and much better camera. This had no clamping plate. Instead his films were given their intermittent movement by a Geneva stop movement similar to that used in watches. To show the picture he simply used a similar movement in the projector, the spectator's eyes blending the rapid succession of still pictures into a smoothly flowing picture which apparently moved.
Friese Greene, the Lumiere's, and now Paul had banked on this factor in making their pictures take on the appearance of movement ; only Edison had failed to experiment along these lines. Whether or not he was unaware of the properties inherent in persistence of vision it is impossible to say. What is certain is that he pinned his faith in the very fast and continuously moving film to try and capture a lifelike representation of movement, and failed.
The film in his kinetoscope camera moved intermittently — it had to pause to take each separate photograph otherwise it would have been blurred, but it never occurred to Edison to run the projector in the same way, and thereby, despite frantic attempts which he made when it was too late, he not only failed to establish his claim to be inventor of the cinema but also missed a fortune notwithstanding that, later, he formed a cartel aimed at forcing all other motion picture apparatus off the market as being infringements of his patents.
The situation was not without its ironic side in the 90' s. Friese Greene had invented the moving picture and had gone unrewarded and all but forgotten. Louis Lumiere and Paul derived their machines from the kinetoscope in the first place, improving upon it so that it would show pictures on a screen, while Edison himself never achieved satisfactory projection and had to adopt another man's invention, that of C. Francis Jenkins, a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington, in order to keep up with the pace which Lumiere and Paul had set.
By a curious coincidence and no pre-arrangement, Paul's first demonstration of his machine, he called it the Theatrograph, was given on the very same day that the Lumiere show opened at the Polytechnic. Paul's show, however, was semi-private. It was given at the Finsbury Technical College. A week later he gave another exhibition of it at the Royal Institution.
Lady Harris, wife of the famous impressario of Drury Lane was present on the second occasion and was so impressed that she told