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HISTORY OF THE MACHINE 21
at the Royal Institution in February, 1896.1 Meissonier, the painter, synthesized the photographic analysis into motion pictures by projecting transparences on a machine similar to the Heyl phasmatrope.2 By 1890 the " moving picture " was in existence.3 I shall leave my readers to compare these statements. From the various records of the history of Cinematography it appears that theory, experiment and practice with which inventors and others have been concerned according to their lights, fall broadly into two groups: — drawings and abstract science, and photography. The commercial history of the Cinema has followed the solution of the first important problems of photography, like that of the rapid plate, in its relation to the film.
This book begins with the commercial history of the Cinema. It seeks to show that if commercialism had not been introduced to the extent it has been, the Cinema might have had a far different career, and its good purpose would not have been buried by the bad one under a heap of the latter's misdeeds. The Cinema has been treated as a financial investment. The Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 revealed that every section of society has come to invest its money in it, and has expected heavy dividends. It revealed that bankers, financiers, and big plungers of all sorts have regarded it as a part of the Stock Exchange machinery. So closely indeed have they united it with that machinery that when an unparallelled period of gambling in stocks and shares was followed by an equally unparallelled collapse of the machinery, and a sum of no less than ^2,000,000,000 was lost by investors, so deeply did this state of things affect Hollywood that this mighty Cinema Babylon was compelled to cease work for nearly four months, thus offering the competing Hollywoods in other countries a moment to look round to see whether they could overcome the encroachments of the American octopus.4 In this way the Cinema has been
1 Daily paper.
2 " Ency. Brit.," Vol. 15, 14th Ed., 855.
3 " The King Who Was A King," by H. G. Wells.
4 See Sunday Referee, December 15, 1929.