That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 25 impasse checked the progress of the pioneers of photography. When Daguerre began his historic career as the first photographer, an exposure of six hours — more than twenty thousand seconds — was required to obtain a permanent impression of the object photographed. Instantaneous photography seemed at that time as remote a possibility as photography in colors appeared to be but a short time ago. But the time came when Chemistry, the mother of modern marvels, solved the problem confronting the early photographers. The laboratory found a surface so sensitive to light that it could take and retain a picture perfect in detail in less than one thousandth part of a second — a feat which in Daguerre's time would have required an exposure twenty million times as long. How important in connection with the eventual advent of the motion picture was Man's mastery of the time-element in photography is tersely explained by Frederick A. Talbot, an authority on the early history of the cinematograph, as follows: The wonderful achievement of instantaneous photography assumed at first a scientific rather than a commercial value. Many a "snap-shot" is taken which does not betray whether the plate has been exposed for six hours or only one-thousandth of a second; but, on the other hand, a "snap-shot" of a quickly moving object may seize upon and fix an interesting characteristic motion. It was this fact which led certain ingenious