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22 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA
locked up in a gold mine and its natural growth impeded in consequence. Thomas Edison had the first finger in the commercial pie when on April 14th, 1894, his kinetoscope made its first appearance at a kinetoscope parlour at Broadway, New York. But the machine was not a " Gold Rush " for Edison. It found its way abroad where, as the invention was not protected by patents, it fell into the jaws of the sharks. It was rescued from this unhappy position by Edison's union with his chief competitor, the Biograph Co., which till then had been opposing Edison by marketing a machine of its own. A demand for Edison's machine arose. But it appears there were still problems of the Cinema to be solved, that of the projector for instance. In 1895 came me Vitascope which applied a principle discovered by Thomas Armat, — the principle of the modern projector, a film movement which gave each successive image a period of rest and illumination. In 1896 Robert W. Paul demonstrated the projecting machine, the theatrograph. The commercial career of the motion picture on the screen began with the presentation of the Armat machine as the Vitascope at Koster and Bials Music Hall, Herald Square, New York. To these activities must be related the continued influence of the Lumiere Brothers.1 The main fact that emerges from these statements is that the commercial history of the Cinema begins between 1894 and 1896.
A word may be said here with regard to the aesthetic consequence of putting on record inventions and discoveries which rightly considered do not come within the province of the Cinema. To-day the terms " illusion " and " illusion of movement " are frequently used to describe living photography or moving pictures of actual human life. It is not correct to describe living photography as " illusion of movement " any more than it is to describe a " still " picture or dead photograph, as an illusion of stationary objects, or the alphabet as a picto
1 See " Ency. Brit.," 14th Ed., 1929, Vol. 15, p. 855. Also, " The Film Finds Its Tongue," Fitzhugh Green, p. 100.