The Moving Picture World (Apr-Jun 1913)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD 1239 Steam" (Kinemacolor). By the Rev. E. Boudinot Stockton, S. T. B. AN old writer once said, '"Curiosity and laziness are really good gifts of God because He means them to prod men into becoming human beings useful to their fellow creatures." The old monk lived several hundred years before either Watt and Stephenson and the invention of Kinemacolor, but. he could not have fitted the cases of the two great inventors as told by Kinemacolor better if he had seen the photoplay, in which, in strict accordance with tradition, curiosity changes James Watt from a country dunce to the inventor of the steam engine, and laziness starts George Stephenson's mind working on the idea of the locomotive. According to history. Watt was not the inventor of the steam engine, but its greatest improver. Steam as a motive Watts and His First Steam Engine. power was known in the first and second centuries A. D., and wa> used as such in England as early as 1663. In 1705. Newcomen, Callen and Savery patented their engine which was the first to have a beam and to employ the instantaneous condensation ot steam. In 1759, at the age of twenty-three, while connected with the University of Glasgow. Watt began experimenting on a steam carriage. In 1769, while repairing the university's Newcomen engine he invented and patented Stephenson and His First Locomotive. his separate condenser and from then until 1800 he added improvement to improvement on the old Newcomen machine until he had embodied all the essential features of the modern steam engine. Bearing these facts in mind, Kinemacolor has rendered a great service to education in its apt and excellent portrayal of the romantic folktales that have sprung up around Watt and his invention, and the moral value of the tradition as pointed up in the photoplay is just what teachers and educators want. Stupidity is often only genius driven the wrong way and a good girl's sympathy will often accomplish what all the rods and dunce caps in the world are ineffectual in bringing about. Watt gets his inspiration when he sticks the potato on the spout of the tea kettle and sets the kettle top to bobbing up and down, and he works it out to a practical result because he wants to marry his childhood sweetheart, the only one who sympathized and believed in him when he was ridiculed at school and cuffed at home. George Stephenson gets his inspiration when he gets tired of pushing an ore car, and he preserves until successful because his sweetheart and wife cheers him with her sympathy and leaves him the legacy of a son to be educated, so that he might become one of the greatest bridge builders in the world. The story of Watt starts with the surreptitious but vain efforts of his girl sweetheart to save him from having to wear the dunce cap, and ends with his bride to be and himself seeing in the glowing embers visions of the engine that was to make their happiness an actuality. Stephenson's story begins with the lazy boy wondering why he cannot put Watt's engine on wheels and make it do his work for him and ends with the inventor and his son dreaming of the mile a minute limited speeding across the plains of Western America. The visions in both cases are extremely well done, the first is artistic in the highest degree and the second is one of the best pictures of an express train running at high speed that we have ever seen. Both stories lend themselves aptly to the peculiar genius of the Kinemacolor process, and the production of the picture is all that can be desired. The photography is excellent and the quaint costumes and settings make beautiful pictures; while the faithful and accurate reproduction of Watt's and Stephenson's engines both in model and working forms are instructive and illuminative in the highest degree. As a contribution to popular science and as a pleasing and elevating photoplay the release should take the first rank. It is now being run at the Carnegie Lyceum. SOLAX FEATURE AT THE UNIQUE TWO DAYS. Fourteenth Street, New York, has been called by theater managers "a hot-bed of competition." And to attract business they try to out-do each other in matters of display advertising and feature programs. Fourteenth Street "eats" features alive. The feature exchangeman cannot serve them up fast enough. The above cut shows what the managers do with the front of their house when they secure a big feature.