Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1922)

the picture was, but the heavy cheering indicates that it was the famous "Annabelle the Dancer." Mr.. Acres took his machine, and Paul set about building another on his own account. Records show that Acres photographed a boat race early in that year and shortly after the completion of the projector. But it was not until January 14, 1896, that he gave a public exhibition of his "kinetic lantern" for projecting pictures, before the Royal Photographic Society. HIS pictures, like Edison's early films, were taken at the rate of forty exposures a second. His subjects included boxers, a naval review at Kiel, racing at Epsom Downs, serpentine dancing and pictures of waves on the coast — the sort of things that were to be staple standards of the motion picture screen for a whole ten years or more. The Paul workshop in the fall of 1895 brought in a name that still survives in the motion picture industry. On his twentieth birthday Cecil Hepworth received as a present from his father a metal turning lathe. Young Mr. Hepworth was an inventive person. He helped his father, who was a scientific lecturer, by tending to the projection of the lantern slides accompanying the lectures. The first thing that Hepworth made on his new lathe was a new type of electric arc lamp, one that could be operated by a handfeed instead of the automatic feed of older types. This enabled the operator of an arc used for projection to continually trim his light and keep the glowing crater of the arc properly centered behind the slides in the projection lantern. TTEPWORTH had heard of ** Paul's new projection machine for "living pictures" and thought that perhaps the arc lamp might be suitable for this purpose. He visited the Paul shop and made a sale. From that small beginning Hepworth has developed into an important factor in the British film industry of today. He is, so far as the films are concerned, the sole survivor of 1895 in England. The Hepworth lamp was applied to Paul's new projector for the films, a machine that went to the English market the next year as the "Theatrograph." Over in France, Louis Lumiere, or rather the brothers A. and L. Lumiere, developed yet another motion picture projection device and at such an early date that they are probably the closest in point of dates to the work of the Lathams in New York. Henry V. Hopwood's work entitled "Living Pictures," written not long 46 The first Mutoscope-Biograph subject ever photographed, a boxing match at Canastota, N. Y. {at top) — A reel from the muloscope machine, showing the arrangement of card pictures {center) — Mutoscope subject No. 77, " The Empire State Express" {below) \ ... . fm&&" I J! 1 r ■ . .v ^^j^r*'**-' '**&* -A -J M 1 \ ^feifj ,^""/ / ' YJ after, says that the Lumieres filed application for patents in France February 13, 1895 and in England April 8, of the same year. These dates it will be recalled are close upon those of the laboratory successes of the Lathams. The filing of applications for patents and the physical matter of reduction to practice are different matters, however. Louis Ducos du Hauron applied for letters patent on the whole idea of the motion picture back in the 6o's, but he never became a real part of motion picture history because he never did anything more than think about it. SO as to the Lumiere brothers, there are two dates of real importance. First, there is a report, rather hazily uncertain, that they showed motion pictures in Marseilles late in April, 1895, and secondly, a well authenticated record of their first official showing July 11, 1895, at the offices of the Revue Generale des Sciences in Paris. This is reported in the British Journal of Photography Supplement dated September 6, 1895. The showing included pictures of a house on fire, street scenes, a dinner party, evolutions of cuirassiers, and a factory. The Lumiere device was named by them the "cinematographe." The name is worthy of note because it survives in motion picture parlance as cinema or kinema all over the world, while the device itself disappeared twenty years ago and the name of Lumiere is as unknown to the film industry today as Latham. Scientifically, there were no more capable early workers in motion pictures than the Lumieres. Only a series of discouraging misfortunes, to be attributed to the bad faith of employes and others prevented them from rising to a permanently important position in the film industry. For three decades the house of Lumiere has been high in photographic attainment, notably in natural color processes. For the sake of completing the record, note is to be made also of the fact that one Muller, a German inventor, applied for a patent on a projection machine in Germany, in August of 1895. But there is no evidence that his machine developed into anything affecting the course of the art. To dispose of a frequent source of caviling letters whenever any discussion of film history is published it is now pointed out that the work of Friese Greene, an English experimenter often cited as "the father of motion pictures" did not in fact figure in the development and application of the principles that make the motion picture. He did have a notion of making pictures in sequence, to (Continued on page 107)