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Marvels of Modern Science

<h5 id="id00181">MOVING PICTURES</h5> Photographing Motion—Edison's Kinetoscope—Lumiere's Cinematographe—Before the Camera—The Mission of the Moving Picture. Few can realize the extent of the field covered by moving pictures. In the dual capacity of entertainment and instruction there is not a rival in sight. As an instructor, science is daily widening the sphere of the motion picture for the purpose of illustration. Films are rapidly superseding text books in many branches. Every department capable of photographic demonstration is being covered by moving pictures. Negatives are now being made of the most intricate surgical operations and these are teaching the students better than the witnessing of the real operations, for at the critical moment of the operation the picture machine can be stopped to let the student view over again the way it is accomplished, whereas at the operating table the surgeon must go on with his work to try to save life and cannot explain every step in the process of the operation. There is no doubt that the moving picture machine will perform a very important part in the future teaching of surgery. In the naturalist's domain of science it is already playing a very important part. A device for micro-photography has now been perfected in connection with motion machines whereby things are magnified to a great degree. By this means the analysis of a substance can be better illustrated than any way else. For instance a drop of water looks like a veritable Zoo with terrible looking creatures wiggling and wriggling through it, and makes one feel as if he never wanted to drink water again. The moving picture in its general phase is entertainment and instruction rolled into one and as such it has superseded the theatre. It is estimated that at the present time in America there are upwards of 20,000 moving picture shows patronized daily by almost ten million people. It is doubtful if the theatre attendance at the best day of the winter season reaches five millions. The moving picture in importance is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the base passions at lowest. Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought together to enact pantomimes which will concentrate within the space of a few minutes the most entertaining and instructive incidents of history and the leading happenings of the world. At all great events, no matter where transpiring, the different moving picture companies have trained men at the front ready with their cameras to "catch" every incident, every movement even to the wink of an eyelash, so that the "stay-at-homes" can see the show as well, and with a great deal more comfort than if they had traveled hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to be present in propria persona. How did moving pictures originate? What and when were the beginning? It is popularly believed that animated pictures had their inception with Edison who projected the biograph in 1887, having based it on that wonderful and ingenious toy, the Zoetrope. Long before 1887, however, several men of inventive faculties had turned their attention to a means of giving apparent animation to pictures. The first that met with any degree of success was Edward Muybridge, a photographer of San Francisco. This was in 1878. A revolution had been brought about in photography by the introduction of the instantaneous process. By the use of sensitive films of gelatine bromide of silver emulsion the time required for the action of ordinary daylight in producing a photograph had been reduced to a very small fraction of a second. Muybridge utilized these films for the photographic analysis of animal motion. Beside a race-track he placed a battery of cameras, each camera being provided with a spring shutter which was controlled by a thread stretched across the track. A running horse broke each thread the moment he passed in front of the camera and thus twenty or thirty pictures of him were taken in close succession within one or two seconds of time. From the negatives secured in this way a series of positives were obtained in proper order on a strip of sensitized paper. The strip when examined by means of the Zoetrope furnished a reproduction of the horse's movements. The Zoetrope was a toy familiar to children; it was sometimes called the wheel of life. It was a contrivance consisting of a cylinder some ten inches wide, open at the top, around the lower and interior rim of which a series of related pictures were placed. The cylinder was then rapidly rotated and the spectator looking through the vertical narrow slits on its outer surface, could fancy that the pictures inside were moving. Muybridge devised an instrument which he called a Zoopraxiscope for the optical projection of his zoetrope photographs. The succession of positives was arranged in proper order upon a glass disk about 18 inches in diameter near its circumference. This disk was mounted conveniently for rapid revolution so that each picture would pass in front of the condenser of an optical lantern. The difficulties involved in the preparation of the disk pictures and in the manipulation of the zoopraxiscope prevented the instrument from attracting much attention. However, artistically speaking, it was the forerunner of the numerous "graphs" and "scopes" and moving picture machines of the present day. It was in 1887 that Edison conceived an idea of associating with his phonograph, which had then achieved a marked success, an instrument which would reproduce to the eye the effect of motion by means of a swift and graded succession of pictures, so that the reproduction of articulate sounds as in the phonograph, would be accompanied by the reproduction of the motion naturally associated with them. The principle of the instrument was suggested to Edison by the zoetrope, and of course, he well knew what Muybridge had accomplished in the line of motion pictures of animals almost ten years previously. Edison, however, did not employ a battery of cameras as Muybridge had done, but devised a special form of camera in which a long strip of sensitized film was moved rapidly behind a lens provided with a shutter, and so arranged as to alternately admit and cut off the light from the moving object. He adjusted the mechanism so that there were 46 exposures a second, the film remaining stationary during the momentary time of exposure, after which it was carried forward far enough to bring a new surface into the proper position. The time of the shifting was about one-tenth of that allowed for exposure, so that the actual time of exposure was about the one-fiftieth of a second. The film moved, reckoning shiftings and stoppages for exposures, at an average speed of a little more than a foot per second, so that a length of film of about fifty feet received between 700 and 800 impressions in a circuit of 40 seconds. Edison named his first instrument the kinetoscope. It came out in 1893. It was hailed with delight at the time and for a short period was much in demand, but soon new devices came into the field and the kinetoscope was superseded by other machines bearing similar names with a like signification. A variety of cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film into position. No shutter was employed. As time passed many other improvements were made. An ingenious Frenchman named Lumiere, came forward with his Cinematographe which for a few years gave good satisfaction, producing very creditable results. Success, however, was due more to the picture ribbons than to the mechanism employed to feed them. Of other moving pictures machines we have had the vitascope, vitagraph, magniscope, mutoscope, panoramagraph, theatograph and scores of others all derived from the two Greek roots grapho I write and scopeo I view. The vitascope is the principal name now in use for moving picture machines. In all these instruments in order that the film projection may be visible to an audience it is necessary to have a very intense light. A source of such light is found in the electric focusing lamp. At or near the focal point of the projecting lantern condenser the film is made to travel across the field as in the kinetoscope. A water cell in front of the condenser absorbs most of the heat and transmits most of the light from the arc lamp, and the small picture thus highly illuminated is protected from injury. A projecting lens of rather short focus throws a large image of each picture on the screen, and the rapid succession of these completes the illusion of life-like motion. Hundreds of patents have been made on cameras, projecting lenses and machines from the days of the kinetoscope to the present time when clear-cut moving pictures portray life so closely and so well as almost to deceive the eye. In fact in many cases the counterfeit is taken for the reality and audiences as much aroused as if they were looking upon a scene of actual life. We can well believe the story of the Irishman, who on seeing the stage villain abduct the young lady, made a rush at the canvas yelling out,—"Let me at the blackguard and I'll murder him." Though but fifteen years old the moving picture industry has sent out its branches into all civilized lands and is giving employment to an army of thousands. It would be hard to tell how many mimic actors and actresses make a living by posing for the camera; their name is legion. Among them are many professionals who receive as good a salary as on the stage. Some of the large concerns both in Europe and America at times employ from one hundred to two hundred hands and even more to illustrate some of the productions. They send their photographers and actors all over the world for settings. Most of the business, however, is done near home. With trapping and other paraphernalia a stage setting can be effected to simulate almost any scene. Almost anything under the sun can be enacted in a moving picture studio, from the drowning of a cat to the hanging of a man; a horse race or fire alarm is not outside the possible and the aviator has been depicted "flying" high in the heavens. The places where the pictures are prepared must be adapted for the purpose. They are called studios and have glass roofs and in most of them a good section of the walls are also glass. The floor space is divided into sections for the setting or staging of different productions, therefore several representations can take place at the same time before the eyes of the cameras. There are "properties" of all kinds from the ragged garments of the beggar to kingly ermine and queenly silks. Paste diamonds sparkle in necklaces, crowns and tiaras, seeming to rival the scintillations of the Kohinoor. At the first, objections were made to moving pictures on the ground that in many cases they had a tendency to cater to the lower instincts, that subjects were illustrated which were repugnant to the finer feelings and appealed to the gross and the sensual. Burglaries, murders and wild western scenes in which the villain-heroes triumphed were often shown and no doubt these had somewhat of a pernicious influence on susceptible youth. But all such pictures have for the most part been eliminated and there is a strict taboo on anything with a degrading influence or partaking of the brutal. Prize fights are often barred. In many large cities there is a board of censorship to which the different manufacturing firms must submit duplicates. This board has to pass on all the films before they are released and if the pictures are in any way contrary to morals or decency or are in any respect unfit to be displayed before the public, they cannot be put in circulation. Thus are the people protected and especially the youth who should be permitted to see nothing that is not elevating or not of a nature to inspire them with high and noble thoughts and with ambitions to make the world better and brighter. Let us hope that the future mission of the moving picture will be along educational and moral lines tending to uplift and ennoble our boys and girls so that they may develop into a manhood and womanhood worthy the history and best traditions of our country. * * * * * * The Wizard of Menlo Park has just succeeded after two years of hard application to the experiment in giving us the talking picture, a real genuine talking picture, wholly independent of the old device of having the actors talk behind the screen when the films were projected. By a combination of the phonograph and the moving picture machine working in perfect synchronism the result is obtained. Wires are attached to the mechanism of both the machines, the one behind the screen and the one in front, in such a way that the two are operated simultaneously so that when a film is projected a corresponding record on the phonograph acts in perfect unison supplying the voice suitable to the moving action. Men and women pass along the canvas, act, talk, laugh, cry and "have their being" just as in real life. Of course, they are immaterial, merely the reflection of films, but the one hundred thousandth of an inch thick, yet they give forth oral sounds as creatures of flesh and blood. In fact every sound is produced harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway. Melba and Tettrazini and Caruso and Bonci appear before you and warble their nightingale notes, as if behind the footlights with a galaxy of beauty, wealth and fashion before them for an audience. True it is not even their astral bodies you are looking at, only their pictured representations, but the magic of their voices is there all the same and there is such an atmosphere of realism about the representations that you can scarcely believe the actors are not present in propriae personae. Mr. Edison had much study and labor of experiment in bringing his device to a successful issue. The greatest obstacle he had to overcome was in getting a phonograph that could "hear" far enough. At the beginning of the experiments the actor had to talk directly into the horn, which made the right kind of pictures impossible to get. Bit by bit, however, a machine was perfected which could "hear" so well that the actor could move at his pleasure within a radius of twenty feet. That is the machine that is being used now. This new combination of the moving picture machine and the phonograph Edison has named the kinetophone. By it he has made possible the bringing of grand opera into the hamlets of the West, and through it also our leading statesmen may address audiences on the mining camps and the wilds of the prairies where their feet have never trodden. <h2 id="id00208" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER V</h2> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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