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

THE MOVIE'S FIRST STEPS 39 discovered that, so far as the English Patent Office was concerned, he was free to manufacture kinetoscopes for the European market and presently went at it with a will and with considerable success. But Paul was a live wire with a vision, as, years ago, I clairvoyantly called Will H. Hays. He realized that the kinetoscope was, like our dead selves, but a stepping-stone to higher things. It furnished a motion picture to only one observer at a time. What Paul wanted, and what the world has proved that it craved, was a device whereby thousands of spectators could gaze at a movie at one and the same moment. Muy bridge had solved the first problem in motion photography, Edison the second, Eastman the third, and Paul was confronted by the fourth, perhaps the most difficult of the quartet. How this resourceful Englishman managed to render the peep-hole of a kinetoscope obsolete and replace it by a screen upon which countless eyes might gaze is a matter of technical and scientific interest, out of place in the story we are telling. Suffice it to say that what he achieved in overcoming the obstacles confronting him has given him a high place on the list of inventors who, one by one, and in widely separated corners of the planet, made possible, during a half century of effort, the motion picture of to-day.