266 DISCOVERY CH. 



and receiver of telephones, and from his fertile brain 

 have come a system of multiple telegraphy, new methods 

 of treating ores and many other agents for the service 

 and pleasure of man. 



The phonograph and the kinematograph are, perhaps, 

 the greatest of Mr. Edison's achievements, both in a 

 scientific and in a popular sense. He was not the first 

 to photograph and combine a series of moving pictures, 

 but he was the inventor of the instrument by which 

 this is now accomplished. So long ago as 1870, Dr. E. J. 

 Marey in France, and a little later Mr. E. Muybridge in 

 the United States, began the analysis of animal move- 

 ments by means of photographs taken at very short 

 intervals. A few years afterwards, Mr. Muybridge 

 arranged successive pictures on glass discs, and by 

 rotating them in front of an optical lantern he was able 

 to produce the visual impression of motion. 



The invention of the celluloid ribbon enabled pictures 

 to be taken on a continuous strip -of film, instead of 

 being arranged on a glass disc, and after careful attention 

 Mr. Edison succeeded in doing this in 1893. The 

 modern kinematograph pictures may be said to date 

 from this development of the work of Marey and Muy- 

 bridge. 



In his first fantastic romance, Mr. H. G. Wells created 

 a time-machine by means of which time could be accele- 

 rated or retarded, and a journey could thus be made 

 into the past or the future. The kinematograph is a 

 veritable time-machine, so far as the past is concerned. 

 It can show the life of an insect or the life of a man in 

 a period which is but a fraction of the true duration, and 

 the period of projection may be the same in each case. 

 If the insect be imagined to be endowed with a mind, 

 its life, though but a day, will seem as long as the three 



