Motion Picture Herald (Sep-Oct 1939)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QUIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Vol. 137, No. I OP October 7, 1939 The First Preview 7IFTY YEARS AGO this week the motion picture became a fact before the eyes of Thomas A. Edison. He, then and there, October 6, 1889, in Room 5 of his laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, dehvered the concept of the hving picture from its reluctant gestations in a century of faltering experimentation. He was, in the meaning of the word to the generality of people, the inventor, and the motion picture was an invention of revolutionary import. The motion picture then was but an amoeba among the arts. Nothing important to the world was to appear about and by and through the films for yet many a year. It had a long road ahead to becoming the dominant, all-pervading amusement vehicle for the world. Most of today's masters of the movies, if there are any, were either in their childhood or being born. They were little boys, with wide, questioning, and often troubled, eyes in the Crimea, in Poland, in London's Whitechapel, Galatia, Hungary, Paris, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. ^/ ' HERE were that day only two men in the world, of meaning to the motion picture, who had any idea of what they were doing or where they were going — Thomas A. Edison, maker of the machine, and George Eastman, maker of the material. Half a century later, it is to be said that one of them, against the years, won the greatest fame, and that the other, far less a patron of fame, by fidelity to a product, won fortune beyond all of the users of his film wares taken together. Let us, without too much searching for significance, look, for the moment, into the world into which the film was born — the world of the autumn of 1889. In these United States, General Benjamin Harrison of Indiana was President. One-third of the population of the United States was of foreign-born parentage. There were four million Germans in the Middle West, three hundred and odd thousand Scandinavians in the Northwest, and immigration was at its flood. America was dreadfully worried about foreign relations and James G. Blaine, the Hull of his time, was busy about South American trade. The prior Cleveland, and Democratic, administration had wound up with the national revenues at ten million dollars a year greater than expenditures. With Matt Quay of Pennsylvania and Tom Piatt of New York doing the election spending. General Harrison went in and the spending in Washington soon caught up with the revenues. The McKinley high protective tariflfs were enacted. Sugar went on the free list and American sugar planters got a ten-million-dollar-a-year compensation. Big business, led by the Standard Oil Trust, formed in 1882, was romping forward so fast that that same Republican administration passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Geronimo had just been captured and Sitting Bull was still negotiating with the government up in the Dakotas. It was the year of the Oklahoma land rush. VER in Germany the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, \^ was getting rid of his father's minister, Prince Otto von Bismarck, and adopting the policy that was to bring the First World War — and today's World War II. Bismarck had just completed for Germany his "Reinsurance Treaty" with Russia which agreed to stay neutral if France should attack the Germans. The partition of Africa was in progress. Victoria, the Empress of Britain and India, was in her glorious sunset years, with yet no sign of Socialism in her domain, and imperialism marching on. Herbert Kitchener was a cavalry officer in Egypt, and a young writer by the name of Rudyard Kipling, then 24 years old, was leaving India on a flush of fame from his "Plain Tales from the Hills." /T was a sunny Sunday October forenoon, when Mr. Edison came ashore from the S. S. Burgoyne. He had been away to an exposition in Paris where there had been much showmanship pertaining to the electric light. He had a merry word of greeting to the ships' news reporters and made some irreverent comment on the cost of "old masters" in [Continued on following page]