A Lighthouse of the Past, a university of universities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge inculcated through a medium understood of all men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of peace and progress from all corners of the earth, forever adapting itself to the growing needs of mankind for enlightenment, sending forth, year after year, its polyglot graduates to carry its teachings, warnings, promises to every tribe and nation on the planet—is it not a consummation to be devoutly wished, a dream worth every sacrifice to bring within the purview of reality? If your answer to this query, dear reader, is in the affirmative, the chances seem to be that you will find the following chapters of this book worthy of your earnest consideration.
CHAPTER II
THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH
Muybridge’s Trotting Horses—Edison’s Kinetoscope—The Problem Eastman Solved—The Movie as a Universal Language—A Toy for Children that Became a World Power—The Men Who Rocked the Cradle of a New Hope for the Race.
CHAPTER II
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.