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13 Piclure Show Annual Dr. Roget to devise a toy which made inanimate objects move. This was achieved by a reversal of the Venetian blind theory. Many other inventions followed, and in 1870 the first public exhibition of moving pictures was given in Phila- delphia by Henry Heyl. About this time many inventors were busy on animated pictures. Among them was a British inventor named Friese Greene, who, in partner- ship with a man named Evans, made a machine with which they demonstrated animated pictures. This machine was shown in Greene’s shop in Piccadilly in 1887, and caused so much interest that the crowd who stopped to see it obstructed the traffic, and Greene had to remove the machine from his window by order of the police. This machine, and all others of that period, used glass plates, and it was not till Eastman and Walker (of America) perfected a ribbon of celluloid film that the cinema, as we know it now, became a practical proposition. Other men made film, but it was Eastman's product that the great Edison used in his machine, the Kineto- scope, which showed moving pictures at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Later, Robert W. Paul, an electrical engineer, of Hatton Garden, London, made another machine which was the real forerunner of the present cinema. Eldison’s Kinetoscope only allowed one person at a time to see the picture ; Paul’s machine threw the picture on a screen so that it could be seen by as many people as could be got in one room, with, of course, limitations in regard to power of projection. So we may say that although many people had a hand in the making of motion pictures, it was an Englishman who made the first modern cinematograph. Paul’s pictures were shown at the Alhambra for four years, though the original contract was for a fortnight only. In these days, when America supplies something like 90 per cent of the pictures shown in the British Empire, it is amazing to think that Paul and a man named Williamson once supplied nearly all the pictures shown in America. EARLY FILMS Most of these early pictures were just snapshots of scenery and views of ordinary subjects—a train entering a railway station being a popular subject—though even in the Alhambra days Paul made a comedy picture called On left: The Parting of the IVays in Covered Wagon." The Below; Adolphe Menjou and Edna Purviance in the film Charles Chaplin directed, "A Woman of Paris.”