Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures

In the United States, England, France and Germany efforts are made to project motion pictures on the screen--Half successes, whole failures, bitter disappointments and yet--perennial hope--to harness magic shadows.

DURING THE PERIOD between the time Edison achieved his first success with motion pictures, in 1889, until his peep-show viewing, machines were put on public display in New York, Paris and London in 1894, hesitant, unsteady steps, like those of a baby learning to walk, were being taken in advancing the magic shadow art-science.

Progress was made in England under Wordsworth Donisthorpe, an interesting character named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, three associates, Greene, Rudge and Evans, and others. In France, there were Marey and Demeny, with Marey developing what was probably the first real motion picture projector capable of projecting more than one short scene--the limitation of all disk models though it was only intended for laboratory use; and Reynaud with the first popular motion picture theatre which, however, did not use photographic pictures. In Germany, Anschütz, inventor of the Tachyscope, was working on a projector, as were others on both sides of the Atlantic.

Donisthorpe, with the help of W. C. Croft, whom he later described as "a good draughtsman" but not a person skilled in optics, constructed about 1889 a Kinesigraph which Donisthorpe had originally suggested in 1877, at the time he wrote concerning

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