64 Electric Cinematograph. 



referred to the work of Mr. May bridge, an American gentleman, 

 who made the study of motion a speciality. He had constructed 

 a sort of battery of cameras, and a kind of racecourse prepared 

 opposite them, and with an electric arrangement he could 

 reverse the shutters of the lenses at fixed points, so as the horse 

 or any other kind of animal passed in front there was recorded 

 the exact attitudes, and although his results were very 

 surprising, indeed, considering he had only the wet collodion 

 process of photography, and the fact that each picture required 

 a separate camera, and those cameras required a considerable 

 time to recharge them with the sensitive plates, it was quite 

 evident he could never hope to produce anything like the 

 results that had been achieved since. Alluding to Mr. Edison, 

 the lecturer said, in " Cassells' Magazine " he was credited with 

 stating that in the year 1887 the idea occurred to him that it 

 was possible to do for the eye what the phonograph had done 

 for the ear, and by combining them both motion and sound 

 could be reproduced simultaneously. Edison's first attempt 

 was of a microscopic character. It was stated that in his 

 practice there was an exposure given to each of nine-tenths of 

 one-forty-sixth of a second, and that the mechanism in the 

 machine moved the sensitive tissue forward the breadth of the 

 picture in the remaining one-tenth of one-forty-sixth of one 

 second, so there were forty- six distinct pictures taken for each 

 second of time. That would make 2,760 pictures per minute, 

 and 165,000 in one hour, and short as those exposures seemed, 

 the photographers present knew that it was quite possible to 

 get good pictures full of detail in that time at somewhere about 

 the one-hundredth of a second. The lecturer described Edison's 

 studio or theatre, which was specially erected to produce these 

 pictures. Both the phonograph and kinematoscope were 

 driven by electric motors, and the entire building was poised 

 on a centre, and could be made to turn round, and thus keep 

 the sun shining on the stage all the day. Of course, the 

 ribbon of pictures, as taken in the camera was a negative image, 

 and there must be printed from it a positive, so the making of 



