SERIES OF RADIOGRAPHS
SHOWING THE MOTIONS OF A
STOMACH SUFFERING FROM
GASTRIC PERISTALSIS

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LARGER IMAGE]

THE smaller illustrations show the exact size of the pictures as they appear on the film. They are an inch wide and three quarters of an inch deep. A reel is usually a thousand feet long, and contains sixteen thousand pictures. On a screen twelve feet square, which is smaller than the usual size, there is surface enough to show twenty-seven thousand of the pictures side by side if they are reproduced without enlargement. Yet if every enlarged picture were shown on a separate twelve-foot screen, a single reel would require a stretch of canvas thirty-six miles long. Likewise a screen twenty feet square would accommodate over seventy-six thousand of the little pictures, and the stretch of canvas required for the enlarged pictures would be sixty miles long. After witnessing a performance, few realize that they have seen any such stretch of pictures as the figures show.

The life of a film is usually from three to six months, though varying, of course, with the treatment in handling. “The Scientific American” gives credit for superiority to films of French make, and attributes their excellence to the many tests to which they are subjected to secure exact dimensions, adequate strength, and other properties.

It is almost as vain to speak of the cost of producing a film as it is to speak of the cost of producing a painting. We know the cost of the canvas of the latter, and we also know the cost of the bare film is three cents per foot; but the cost of what is on the film may be represented only by the cost of developing and the labor of the machine-operator, as, for example, in such pictures as “An Inaugural Parade,” or the famous pictures showing the “Coronation of George V.” Sometimes, however, the cost runs as high as fifty thousand dollars, as did the film known as “The Landing of Columbus.” These films require many people, necessitate the taking of long journeys to provide an appropriate setting, and need from two to three years to finish them. Before the film known as “The Crusaders” was ready for the public, six hundred players and nearly three hundred horses had appeared in front of the lens. The film of “The Passion Play,” now in preparation, will cost, it is said, a hundred thousand dollars.

Mr. Paul Rainey has stated that his wonderful animal pictures, which showed his happenings from the unloading of his expedition from an Atlantic steamer on the coast of Africa, through the various hunts, and up to his departure, likewise cost fifty thousand dollars. Some of these wonderful films demonstrated how practical was his much-laughed-at theory that the Mississippi hounds used for hunting bear could successfully hunt the destructive African lion and the chetah. These pictures, which were taken with the idea of permitting Mr. Rainey’s friends at home to journey with him in spirit in his travels, were first shown publicly last winter at the National Geographic Society in Washington to illustrate a lecture by Mr. Rainey. Those who then enjoyed them can feel only satisfaction to know that they have now been placed on public exhibition, to show to the people at large what Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, has declared to be “the greatest contribution to natural history of the last decade.” The writer recently saw these pictures, and while the films are naturally not as perfect as when first shown in Washington, all the essentials are faithfully reproduced.

It is only recently that the streaky, flickering, eye-straining series of pictures first brought out have been supplanted by pictures so improved and so steady and continuous that the setting of a room or a landscape made up of hundreds of pictures appears as a single photograph. This is admirably illustrated by a portion of Mr. Rainey’s pictures, which show, through the peculiarly clear African atmosphere, a range of mountains ninety miles away. Again, his picture of the drinking-place, where, owing to a long drought, some of the animals had come eighty miles to scratch in the sand for water, shows the stillness of an immense landscape broken only by the swaying of the nests of half a hundred weaver-birds in a single tree, and by the scamper of monkeys, baboons, and other small animals two hundred and fifty yards from the camera. The same still background is shown as these little animals cautiously approach, drink, and are driven away by those of larger size, who in turn give way to companies of zebras, giraffes, rhinos, and elephants.

In a recent lecture given to benefit a fund to establish an animal hospital in New York, Dr. Joseph K. Dixon is credited with having shown a rare set of films which took his audience on a most interesting trip through the Yellowstone Park, and showed them an animal hospital which nature had provided in a secluded spot of aspen-trees, where injured creatures went for rest and convalescence. Many vivid pictures showed lame deer, wounded elk, and bears having their cuts and bruises healed by their own applications of oil taken from the trees.

By permission of “The American Quarterly of Roentgenology”
and “The Archives of the Roentgen Ray”