It was a biograph operator that was engaged in taking pictures of a fire department rushing to a fire. Several pieces of apparatus had passed—an engine, hook-and-ladder company, and the chief; the operator, with his (then) bulky apparatus, large camera, storage batteries, etc., stood right in the centre of the street, facing the stream of engines, hose-wagons, and fire-patrol men. In order to show the contrast, an old-time hand-pump engine, dragged by a dozen men and boys, came along at full speed down the street, and behind and to one side of them followed a two-horse hose-wagon, going like mad. The men running with the old-time engine, not realising how narrow the space was and unaware of the plunging horses behind, passed the biograph man on one side on the dead run. The driver of the rapidly approaching team saw that there was no room for him to pass on the other side of the camera man, and his horses were going too fast to stop in the space that remained. He had but an instant to decide between the dozen men and their antiquated machine and the moving-picture outfit. He chose the latter, and, with a warning shout to the photographer, bore straight down on the camera, which continued to do its work faithfully, taking dozens of pictures a second, recording even the strained, anxious expression on the face of the driver. The pole of the hose-wagon struck the camera-box squarely and knocked it into fragments, and the wheels passed quickly over the pieces, the photographer meanwhile escaping somehow. By some lucky chance the box holding the coiled exposed film came through the wreck unscathed.
When that series was shown on the screen in a theatre the audience saw the engine and hook-and-ladder in turn come nearer and nearer and then rush by, then the line of running men with the old engine, and then—and their flesh crept when they saw it—a team of plunging horses coming straight toward them at frightful speed. The driver's face could be seen between the horses' heads, distorted with effort and fear. Straight on the horses came, their nostrils distended, their great muscles straining, their fore hoofs striking out almost, it seemed, in the faces of the people in the front row of seats. People shrank back, some women shrieked, and when the plunging horses seemed almost on them, at the very climax of excitement, the screen was darkened and the picture blotted out. The camera taking the pictures had continued to work to the very instant it was struck and hurled to destruction.
In addition to the stereopticon and its attendant mechanism, which is only suitable when the pictures are to be shown to an audience, a machine has been invented for the use of an individual or a small group of people. In the mutoscope the positives or prints are made on long strips of heavy bromide paper, instead of films, and are generally enlarged; the strip is cut up after development and mounted on a cylinder, so they radiate like the spokes of a wheel, and are set in the same consecutive order in which they were taken. The thousands of cards bearing the pictures at the outer ends are placed in a box, so that when the wheel of pictures is turned, by means of a crank attached to the axle, a projection holds each card in turn before the lens through which the observer looks. The projection in the top of the box acts like the thumb turning the pages of a book. Each of the pictures is presented in such rapid succession that the object appears to move, just as the scenes thrown on the screen by a lantern show action.
The mutoscope widens the use of motion-photography infinitely. The United States Government will use it to illustrate the workings of many of its departments at the World's Fair at St. Louis: the life aboard war-ships, the handling of big guns, army maneuvers, the life-saving service, post-office workings, and, in fact, many branches of the government service will be explained pictorially by this means.
Agents for manufacturers of large machinery will be able to show to prospective purchasers pictures of their machines in actual operation. Living, moving portraits have been taken, and by means of a hand machine can be as easily examined as pictures through a stereoscope. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that circulating libraries of moving pictures will be established, and that every public school will have a projecting apparatus for the use of films, and a stereopticon or a mutoscope. In fact, a sort of circulating library already exists, films or mutoscope pictures being rented for a reasonable sum; and thus many of the most important of the world's happenings may be seen as they actually occurred.
Future generations will have histories illustrated with vivid motion pictures, as all the great events of the day, processions, celebrations, battles, great contests on sea and land are now recorded by the all-seeing eye of the motion-photographer's camera.