THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS
NO story of the evolution of the motion picture from an experiment in photography to a factor in the daily lives of millions of people would be complete without a passing reference to the impetus given by George Eastman, of Rochester, N.Y., to what was at the outset a toy for children—destined eventually to challenge the untried resources of the laboratory. Thomas A. Edison says: “Without George Eastman I don’t know what the result would have been in the history of the motion picture.” For a long time after Muybridge had demonstrated the possibility of photographing objects in motion any real advance in what was practically a new art was impeded by the weight, fragility and general inadequacy of the glass plates employed in camera work. Gelatine, transparent paper, and other substitutes for glass, were tried in vain. How Eastman finally solved the problem by the use of celluloid is explained tersely and clearly by F. A. Talbot as follows:
In the early part of 1889 experiments were being made to discover a varnish to take the place of gelatine sheets. One of his chemists drew Mr. Eastman’s attention to a thick solution of gun-cotton in wood alcohol. It was tested to prove its suitability to take the place of the gelatine, but was found wanting in practical efficiency. However, Mr. Eastman recognized the solution as one which might prove to be the film base for which he had been searching. He had had such a medium in mind when engaged in his first experiments in 1884, which resulted in the production of the stripping film. He decided to utilize this solution of gun-cotton in wood alcohol and fashion it into the foundation for the sensitized emulsion, so that stripping and other troublesome operations of a like nature might be avoided. He was moved to this experiment because this solution could be made almost as transparent practically as glass. Accordingly he set to work to devise a machine to prepare thin sheets such as he required from this mixture. Success crowned his efforts, and in 1889 the first long strip of celluloid film suited to cinematograph work appeared in the United States.
Thus had George Eastman removed for Thomas A. Edison the one obstacle that had hitherto made the latter’s projected kinetoscope impracticable, and celluloid had become the “Open Sesame” to that wonderland in which the movie fans of to-day delight to wander.
Like the telephone which was, in its early days, looked upon as an interesting scientific toy not destined to play an important part in the daily lives of the people at large, Edison’s kinetoscope was not taken seriously by the crowds who found it but one of many novel features combining to make the Chicago World Fair of 1893 a success. They flocked to see it, marvelled at its ingenuity, but failed, as did Edison himself, to realize that the world had been enriched by not merely a new plaything but by a novel medium for influencing the destinies of the race, the ultimate stupendous significance of which we, even thirty years later, can only vaguely estimate. It is amazing but true that, so little did Edison appreciate the fact that he had invented not an ephemeral toy but the only universal language yet vouchsafed to the race, he neglected to obtain patents for his kinetoscope outside of the United States. His oversight in this connection had far-reaching results, the most important of which historically gave to England instead of the United States the honor of throwing upon a screen the first “movie,” as that word is understood to-day.
That a Yankee notion should fail to realize its own possibilities and be forced eventually to thank an Englishman for placing it upon the heights from which it was to win world-dominion is not an agreeable reflection to the ultra-patriotic American, but our story of the evolution of the movie must now take us across the Atlantic and introduce to us Mr. Robert W. Paul, electrical engineer and manufacturer of scientific apparatus, whose workshops were located in Hatton Garden, London. Reversing the process of the “star of empire” it was Eastward that the movie, in its search for development, had taken its way. Cradled in California, it had learned to walk in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Rochester, New York, and was now to realize its youthful possibilities in the British metropolis.
Two peripatetic Athenians, one of them a toy-maker, had seen, admired and coveted the Edison kinetoscope at the Chicago World’s Fair. They had the European market in mind for the new plaything and acted at once without looking into the question of patents. To Paul, at Hatton Garden, London, came the Athenians with a kinetoscope they had obtained in the United States, urging him to manufacture duplicates with which they might supply the English, and possibly the Continental, market. Paul, however, had read his Virgil and heeded the old poet’s warning against Greeks bearing gifts. Supposing, of course, that Edison had protected his invention by English patents, Paul rejected the proposition of the Greeks. Later, however, he 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. Muybridge 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.
We get from Frederick A. Talbot a side-light on an historic episode in London that was the turning-point in the career of Robert W. Paul, and of even greater importance to the human race than any but a few far-seeing movie enthusiasts have yet realized. Says Talbot:
About three o’clock one morning, in the early months of 1895, the quietness of Hatton Garden was disturbed by loud and prolonged shouts. The police rushed hurriedly to the building whence the cries proceeded, and found Paul and his colleagues in their workshop, giving vent to whole-hearted exuberance of triumph. They had just succeeded in throwing the first perfect animated pictures upon a screen. To compensate the police for their fruitless investigation, the film, which was forty feet in length, and produced a picture seven feet square, was run through the special lantern for their edification. They regarded the strange spectacle as ample compensation, and had the satisfaction of being the first members of the public to see moving pictures thrown upon the screen.
Unfortunately the law-abiding fervor that animates the soul of the London “Bobby” did not get into the camera on that epoch-making night. Had it done so, the early career of the motion picture might have been less objectionable to the guardians of morals on both sides of the Atlantic. But that’s another story—to be told in a later chapter. It is only just to say here, however, that it was not the fault of Robert W. Paul that in their early years the movies went, more or less, to the bow-wows.
Of Paul and his sensational achievement as the father, or, rather, the step-father, of the movie there is much interesting data extant, the leading features of which are destined to hold a permanent place in the history of the newest of the arts developed by Man’s genius. How, in partnership with Sir Augustus and Lady Harris, he made of the Olympia Theatre in London the first picture palace in the world, catching the popular fancy with what he called his “theatograph”; how he was eventually in control of eight London theatres showing motion pictures; how his contract with the Alhambra Theatre for two weeks of pictures in March, 1896, was stretched eventually to cover four years are part of the early records of the screen and account for the name “Daddy Paul” by which this ingenious and daring Englishman is known in movie circles across the water.
But even Paul’s early successes with motion pictures in the London music halls did not open his eyes, or the eyes of his colleagues, to the possibilities and permanency of the new form of entertainment they had given to the world. Both Paul and Sir Augustus Harris believed that the fickle public would soon tire of what seemed to be to them merely an ephemeral novelty, to be soon relegated, as had been countless vaudeville innovations, to the over-flowing theatrical lumber-room. One of the strangest features of the history of the motion pictures during the period of their early youth is that hardly one of their scientific or commercial exploiters, from Edison down, had anything like a full appreciation of the future that awaited the screen, of the marvellous power for growth that lay in the germ from which the toy kinetoscope had sprung.
There are those who assert that the ultimate salvation of modern civilization will be accomplished by a triple alliance established by the United States, England and France. Those who make this prediction have in mind, of course, a trio of fighting nations who, by force of arms, will eventually compel an unruly world to come to order and accept the point of view cherished by the conquerors. But is it not possible that America, England and France, having worked together as a triple alliance to perfect the motion picture, have given to the race a medium for enlightenment that may make another world war in defence of civilization unnecessary? Is it not, at least, conceivable that these three nations, whose inventive and progressive genius made, through Daguerre, Edison and Paul, the motion picture possible may find, in time to save humanity from a hideous cataclysm, that the screen, in a democratic world, may so strengthen the influence of peace-making diplomacy as to render eventually armies and navies practically obsolete?
And in this connection, it is interesting to note that the claim of France to a high place in that triple alliance which made the movies a tremendous power for both good and evil in a perturbed world does not rest wholly upon Daguerre and his invention of the daguerreotype. No account of the evolution of the motion picture would be complete without reference to the impetus given to the new industry in “Daddy” Paul’s halcyon days by the Messrs. Lumière and Sons, of Paris, France, manufacturers of photographic apparatus, dry plates, etc. The Edison kinetoscope had come within their purview in 1893 and they had realized at once, as had Paul, that a motion picture that could have but one observer at a time was merely a butterfly in the chrysalis. The Messrs. Lumière solved ingeniously, and in their own way, the problem that had confronted Paul and are entitled to a part of the glory that goes to those who changed the kinetoscope from a peep-show for one to a screen display for hundreds.
It was the French machine that brought Edison’s one-eyed toy back to the country of its birth raised to the dignity of an amusement for adults. Through the energy and far-sightedness of Richard G. Hollaman, head of the Eden Musée, of New York, the Lumière apparatus, in the Fall of 1896, created something of a sensation in the American metropolis. To the Eden Musée, known to fame for its presentation of historic personages of the past, belongs the honor of making the path to glory easy to the celebrities of to-day. Fame was now to discard stuffed effigies as a reward for greatness to use the screen to bring the exalted of the earth down to the masses. The movie had been finally launched upon a career that was to lead it toward heights from which to-day it can see a future that, unless the human race wantonly commits hari-kari, will be unimaginably glorious.