THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH
FOR countless ages Man watched the birds in flight, realized his own motor handicaps, and relegated his hope of flying to a life which he might eventually lead in the world of spirits. An insect or an angel might have wings but the lord of the earth was by nature debarred from the air. Then somebody somewhere invented a kite, and for another series of centuries Man played with a toy whose ultimate significance he failed to grasp. He had not as yet sensed the picturesque truth that the world’s most potential inventions have come to us, by a process of evolution, from children’s playthings. The laboratory had its beginnings in the nursery. The cave-man’s children taught him progress.
Through suggestions from the kite, the Wright brothers made air navigation possible. From another toy, Edison’s kinetoscope, has come the cinematograph. And even its inventor, possessing, though he does, the creative imagination, failed to realize until recent years the startling possibilities imbedded in the plaything with which he entertained the cosmopolitan throngs that flocked to the World’s Fair at Chicago in 1893.
When Edison recently made a visit to the General Electric Company’s plant at Schenectady, N.Y., to recall old memories and to forecast the future possibilities of electrical devices, he found there still standing two insignificant old sheds by the river bank, the modest plant of the original Edison Machine Works of 1886. In amazing contrast to this relic of the past there stretched away in every direction factory after factory, covering an area of 523 acres, and vouchsafing to the Wizard of Menlo Park a concrete manifestation of the fact that in this age of progress even the wildest dream may eventually come true. But the contrast between Edison’s work-shop of 1886 and the General Electric plant of to-day, astounding as it is, is, in its outward aspects, a local phenomenon. To visualize it, you must go to Schenectady, N.Y. The difference between Edison’s kinetoscope of thirty years ago and the moving picture of the moment can be appreciated, on the other hand, by a mere effort of the memory and the imagination combined. The kinetoscope has been relegated to the attic but the moving picture has acquired as its domain not merely the earth but the starry heavens and the realms of space. Eventually the very outer edge of the physical universe is destined to be screened.
Before recounting presently the amazing and romantic story of the evolution of the motion picture from a plaything to a medium unrivalled for the promulgation of both good and evil, a Frankenstein created by Man’s ingenuity that must be given a soul to make it safe for the world, it may be well to pause at the outset to answer the query, frequently put to the writer, as to why what seems to be merely a popular form of amusement should be taken seriously as a factor in the struggle modern civilization is undergoing to save itself from destruction. Perhaps no better answer to this question can be given than is furnished by certain facts and figures presented by Will H. Hays to the National Education Association in session at Boston, Mass., in July, 1922, in the following illuminating words:
In a little over fifteen years the motion picture has grown from a naked idea until to-day it is the principal amusement of millions. It has become one of the greatest industries in America, having an investment of $1,250,000,000, with $75,000,000 paid annually in salaries and wages, and $520,000,000 taken in annually for admissions. In the United States, in the big cities and in those ample-shaded towns and villages which comprise America, there are perhaps fifteen thousand motion picture theatres and in those theatres more than seven million seats. Taking into account at least two performances a day, and applying the collected statistics, we estimate that every seven days between Maine and California, fifty million men, women and children look for an hour or two at the motion picture screen.
Nothing further need be said in regard to the importance of the general subject we have under consideration. A medium for expression which makes its imprint weekly upon the minds of approximately one half of our population is worthy of the closest study by the people of this country. Its origin, its early growth, its present status and its future as a universal language, destined, perhaps, to be the greatest civilizing medium the race has known, are topics the timely importance of which can hardly be overrated. To paraphrase an old political truism, as goes the screen so goes the country—and, possibly, the race at large.
Briefly the early history of the cinematograph is in substance as follows: By the revolutionary achievement of the Frenchman Daguerre, who discovered a method whereby sunlight could be made to fix a permanent image of an object upon a sensitized surface, a door was opened showing the way to the marvellous triumphs that the last century has vouchsafed to the camera. But impasse after 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 minds to perceive in instantaneous photography a valuable means of analyzing motion. If a single photograph reproduced the exact posture of a moving object at any given instant of time, they argued that a series of such photographs, if taken in sufficiently rapid succession, would form a complete record of the whole cycle of movements involved, for instance in the jump of a horse or the flap of a bird’s wing.
Thomas A. Edison, in an interview given to Mr. Hugh Weir and recently published in McClure’s Magazine, enlightens us regarding Mr. Talbot’s proposition. Asked what first suggested to him the idea of the motion-picture camera, Mr. Edison said:
The phonograph. I had been working for several years on experiments for recording and reproducing sound, and the thought occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus to do for the eye what the phonograph was designed to do for the ear. It was in 1887 that I began my investigations, and photography, compared with what it is to-day, was in a decidedly crude state of development. Pictures were made by “wet” plates, operated by involved mechanism. The modern dry films were unheard of. I had only one fact to guide me at all. This was the principle of optics, technically called “the persistence of vision,” which proves that the sensation of light lingers in the brain for anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth part of a second after the light has disappeared from the sight of the eye.
In other words, the fact that the human eye is a photographic camera possessing memory may eventually save civilization from the cataclysm of which contemporary prophets warn us, in that it has made possible a medium of communication for the race at large denied to us by the tongue.
Posterity will owe a great debt of gratitude to Thomas A. Edison for various revolutionary inventions but it begins to be apparent to optimistic observers that perhaps his chief claim to the thanks of mankind will be due to the initial impetus he gave to the motion picture, vouchsafing to a bewildered race the universal language of the eye, by which, possibly, the brotherhood of man may eventually function to overcome the evils that have darkened our past. Says Edison: “I do not believe that any other single agency of progress has the possibilities for a great and permanent good to humanity that I can see in the motion picture. And these possibilities are only beginning to be touched.”
Will it not repay us, then, to examine the “possibilities” to which Mr. Edison refers, to the end that we may take the screen more seriously than heretofore, may regard motion picture theatres more attentively and hopefully as being, perhaps, civilization’s one best bet? Unless, however, we get a somewhat comprehensive view of the variegated past of the movies “the permanent good to humanity” that they can accomplish will not be apparent to us. Let us, therefore, get on with our story.
The early history of the cinematograph presents a study in international rivalry. The United States, England and France wrote names on the scroll of fame upon which the scientists and promoters who rendered motion pictures possible make their bid for immortality. Edison and Eastman, Americans, Daguerre and the Messrs. Lumière and Sons, Frenchmen, and Muybridge and Robert Paul, Englishmen, are the leading names among the dramatis personæ who took part in the first act of a drama that began as an amusement for children but which now promises to develop into a miracle-play regenerating the human race.
Scientific technicalities have no place in a book designed to tell the story of the movies from what is called in newspaper circles “the human interest standpoint,” but it is necessary to apportion credit here for what the three nations above mentioned did respectively toward solving the initial problems confronting the pioneers who raised photography from a tortoise to a bird, giving it pinions that defy time and space. To change the metaphor, Daguerre, a Frenchman, rocked the cradle of photography, Muybridge, an Englishman, taught it to run, and Edison, an American, gave it wings. Behold here, at last, a triple alliance that is changing the face not merely of a continent but of a planet. The mountains were in labor and brought forth not a little mouse but a marvellous creature whose dynamics for both good and evil can not be over-estimated.
The claim that England can put forward for furnishing first aid to the movies bears the date 1872 and is summarized as follows by Mr. Edison:
An Englishman of the name of Muybridge, who was an enthusiast on two subjects—cameras and race horses—was visiting, at his California farm, Senator Leland Stanford, who was also something of a “crank” on the subject of blooded trotters. During the visit the merits of a certain horse, owned by the Senator, came under discussion, Stanford contending for one fact, and his guest arguing for another. To settle the dispute Muybridge conceived an ingenious plan.
Along one side of the private race-course on the farm he placed a row of twenty-four cameras. Attached to the shutter of each, he fastened a long thread, which in turn was carried across the track, and then, to make sure of obtaining sharp exposures, he erected a white screen opposite to serve as a reflector. When all was in readiness the race horse was turned loose down the track.
As it dashed past the rows of cameras the various threads were snapped, and a series of photographs, establishing each successive point in the “action” of the horse, were automatically registered. When they were developed they revealed for the first time a complete photographic record of the minutest details of a horse in actual motion, and Muybridge had the satisfaction of using them to win his argument.
He would have laid the pictures away in his private collection, but someone suggested trying the effect on a Zoetrope (akin to the Kinetoscope) apparatus. The result was so startling that it created something of a public sensation. But, except as a novelty, there was little practical benefit gained. To have made an actual motion picture, lasting even for the space of a single minute, at the rate of twelve exposures per second, the minimum for steady illusion, would have required, under the plan of Muybridge, seven hundred and twenty different cameras.
Half a century has passed since that historic day when Muybridge demonstrated that he had a better eye for trotting horses than Senator Stanford and put California on the map as a prominent centre of motion picture progress, a position which that State has most brilliantly maintained. During the fifty years from 1872 to 1922, the period from Muybridge to Griffith, the scientific problems confronting the pioneer inventors of the cinematograph, and they were many and difficult, were solved; and from the crude pictures of a trotting horse in motion were evolved the screen marvels of to-day. The high lights of that crucial half century in the development of the movies, a development that is not only interesting in itself but full of encouragement to the optimist who believes that the new and universal language of the eye may be employed to warn the race against repeating the errors of the past, will be considered in the following chapters of this book.