The talkies (1930)

8 THETALKIES discs and cylinders, this was the first hint of the form that motion-picture records were to take. It will not take much to ask the reader to believe that Thomas Edison was hot on the track of the motion-picture idea ; he was, in fact, one of the glass-cylinder merchants in the same year, and shortly after made a record on a strip after the fashion of the Le Prince machine soon after that unfortunate gentleman so mysteriously disappeared. A year before this, however, there was patented in America an idea of prime importance to the development of motion-picture films. An American clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Hannibal Goodwin, conceived the notion of using celluloid instead of glass for photographic plates, in such a way that a series of pictures could be photographed on to it without the necessity of making separate pictures and mounting them. In the same year, however, someone in England was doing a lot of hard thinking about the idea of the motion picture ; that was Mr. Frieze-Greene, who in his laboratory at Chelsea was laying the foundations of the motion picture as it is produced to-day. In 1888 he made a photographic film on paper soaked in a no less homely fluid than castor oil in order to make the paper suffi