That Marvel—The Movie / A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future

by Edward S. Van Zile

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.