It has been variously estimated that there are already from fifteen
thousand to thirty thousand moving-picture show-places in the United
States. Greater New York alone has six hundred. Their development as
an industry has been very recent. For while as early as 1864 a French
patent was granted to Ducos for a battery of lenses, which, actuated
in rapid succession, depicted successive stages of movement, this
device could not have fulfilled the requirements of the moving-picture
of to-day for the important reason, if for no other, that the dry,
sensitized plate of that day could not receive impressions with
sufficient rapidity. With the advent of instantaneous photography came
what was probably the direct forerunner of the motion-picture in the
work of Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer who, about 1878, began his
camera studies of “The Horse in Motion,”[4] “Animal Locomotion,”[5] and
other motion studies. His work was begun in California, on the private
race-course of Governor Leland Stanford. Here he employed a battery of
twenty-four cameras, spaced a foot apart, the shutters of which were
sprung by the horse coming in contact with threads stretched across the
track.
Mr. Edison’s kinetoscope camera, begun in 1889, was described in
court[6] as “capable of producing an indefinite number of negatives on
a single, sensitized, flexible film, at a speed theretofore unknown.”
In his patent specification, Mr. Edison refers to this speed by saying,
“I have been able to take with a single camera and tape film as many as
forty-six photographs per second.”
A recently published account of what seemed a novel development served
to show that other inventors were also busy on the subject nearly
twenty years ago. The innovation makes use of glass plates instead of
the ordinary films. The pictures are taken in rows, 162 to a plate, and
the finished plate resembles a sheet of postage-stamps. Provision is
made for carrying eighteen plates and for automatically shifting the
plates to take the pictures in proper sequence.
Mr. Edison first showed the world his completed invention at the
world’s fair in Chicago in 1893; but it was nearly 1900 before this
infant industry could be said to be fairly started, though one
enterprising manager had a regular place of exhibition as early as
1894. Two years ago it was estimated that in a single year the country
paid over a hundred million dollars in admissions. There are no
definite figures available, though the census officials contemplate
gathering such statistics this year. It is probably safe, however,
to place the present revenue from admissions at close to two hundred
million dollars.
[Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by The Biograph Co.