Stories of Inventors: The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers

by Russell Doubleday

A negative, however, is of no use unless a positive or print of some kind is made from it. If shown through a stereopticon, for instance, a negative would make all the shadows on the screen appear lights, and vice versa. A positive, therefore, is made by running a fresh film, with the negative, through a machine very much like the moving-picture camera. The unexposed surface is behind that of the negative, and at the proper intervals the shutter is opened and the admitted light prints the image of the negative on the unexposed film, just as a lantern slide is made, in fact, or a print on sensitised paper. The positives are made by this machine at the rate of a score or so in a second. Of course, the positive is developed in the same manner as the negative.

Therefore, in order to show the people in the theatre the Suburban, five hundred feet of film was exposed, developed, fixed, and dried, and nearly ten thousand separate and complete pictures were produced, in the space of two hours and fifteen minutes, including the time occupied in taking the films to and from the track, factory, and theatre.

Originally, successive pictures of moving objects were taken for scientific purposes. A French scientist who was studying aerial navigation set up a number of cameras and took successive pictures of a bird's flight. Doctor Muybridge, of Philadelphia, photographed trotting horses with a camera of his own invention that made exposures in rapid succession, in order to learn the different positions of the legs of animals while in rapid motion.

A Frenchman also—M. Mach—photographed a plant of rapid growth twice a day from exactly the same position for fifty consecutive days. When the pictures were thrown on the screen in rapid order the plant seemed to grow visibly.

The moving pictures provide a most attractive entertainment, and it was this feature of the idea, undoubtedly, that furnished the incentive to inventors. The public is always willing to pay well for a good amusement.

The makers of the moving-picture films have photographic studios suitably lighted and fitted with all the necessary stage accessories (scenery, properties, etc.) where the little comedies shown on the screens of the theatres are acted for the benefit of the rapid-fire camera and its operators, who are often the only spectators. One of these studios in the heart of the city of New York is so brilliantly lighted by electricity that pictures may be taken at full speed, thirty to forty-five per second, at any time of day or night. Another company has an open-air gallery large enough for whole troops of cavalry to maneuver before the camera, or where the various evolutions of a working fire department may be photographed.

Of course, when the pictures are taken in a studio or place prepared for the work the photographic part is easy—the camera man sets up his machine and turns the crank while the performers do the rest. But some extra-ordinary pictures have been taken when the photographer had to seek his scene and work his machine under trying and even dangerous circumstances.

During the Boer War in South Africa two operators for the Biograph Company took their bulky machine (it weighed about eighteen hundred pounds) to the very firing-line and took pictures of battles between the British and the Burghers when they were exposed to the fire of both armies. On one occasion, in fact, the operator who was turning the mechanism—he sat on a bicycle frame, the sprocket of which was connected by a chain with the interior machinery—during a battle, was knocked from his place by the concussion of a shell that exploded nearby; nevertheless, the film was saved, and the same man rode on horseback nearly seventy-five miles across country to the nearest railroad point so that the precious photographic record might be sent to London and shown to waiting audiences there.

Pictures were taken by the kinetoscope showing an ascent of Mount Blanc, the operator of the camera necessarily making the perilous journey also; different stages of the ascent were taken, some of them far above the clouds. For this series of pictures a film eight hundred feet long was required, and 12,800 odd exposures or negatives were made.

Successive pictures have been taken at intervals during an ocean voyage to show the life aboard ship, the swing of the great seas, and the rolling and pitching of the steamer. The heave and swing of the steamer and the mountainous waves have been so realistically shown on the screen in the theatre that some squeamish spectators have been made almost seasick. It might be comforting to those who were made unhappy by the sight of the heaving seas to know that the operator who took one series of sea pictures, when lashed with his machine in the lookout place on the foremast of the steamer, suffered terribly from seasickness, and would have been glad enough to set his foot on solid ground; nevertheless, he stuck to his post and completed the series.