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DISCUSSION
Mr. Crabtree: Have you considered manufacturing a cheaper and hand operated machine which might possibly be more universally used? With the foot operated machine there is danger of injuring the fingers if the foot lever slips. This danger would be eliminated if the various levers were controlled with the hands. There is need of a semi-automatic splicer which is portable and which can be sold for about $25. I think that such a machine could be made, utilizing the principles of the foot operated machine.
Mr. McNabb: I might say, in answer to that question, that the first splicing machine made was a hand-operated affair, but it was not fast enough for the average laboratory. Foot-operation ehminates quite a few operations, and while a cheaper hand machine could be made, we find the average operator will not pay over $5 for a machine. You cannot build a machine of the accuracy of the semi-automatic for many times five dollars and even if it could be done you would still have trouble in getting many operators to use any kind of machine.
As to the accident hazard, there is none. Not any more than there is in operating a typewriter or adding machine, once the operator is familiar with the levers. The majority of the operators make a crude hand splice and I might say this also applies to exchanges. If you have visited the exchanges and have seen the way film is handled, you will know what I mean. I think Mr. Richardson's paper would go quite a ways toward teaching them something, if they pay attention to it.
Mr. Richardson: As long as you consider the projectionist as being merely the operator of a machine, he doesn't care. He is a cheap man. Why should he pay $5 for something the theater should bmT? I do not think the General Electric Company employees buy the tools; I believe the company does. The Westinghouse employees would raise an awful howl if compelled to buy a vise. You are working backwards. You are asking them to pay $5 for something the theater itself should purchase.
I did not get up exactly to make that oration.
I mean it, just the same, every word of it. That machine, I think, caused just a little more trouble than any other one thing I know of. Not, as you say, through any fault of the machine itself, but because it is not handled right. First-run film would come in two, sometimes four or five places in a single feature. It was no uncommon thing. It was not the fault of the machine, it was the fault of the very great accuracy with which it must be operated, and it was placed in the hands of people who could not, or would not, operate it that way,
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