American Cinematographer - December 2019 - 20

celluloid not being available until a year or
two later, and cine projectors having not
yet been invented; this paper negative
could be printed as a positive film and run
as a Fox Grandeur film today.
In May, 1889, William FrieseGreene, 92, Piccadilly, London, made a
motion picture negative of a scene on the
Esplanade, Brighton, England, using paper
film negative 21⁄2 inches wide and 11⁄2
inches height to each frame. Later in the
same year he used celluloid film displacing
the paper used earlier.
One of the first to project successfully upon a large sized screen was Mr.
Woodville Latham, inventor of the Latham
Loop which caused much patent litigation
in the early days. Latham called his
machine the Eidoloscope and used wide
film 2 inches wide with frames 3⁄4-inch
high by 11⁄2 inches long.
Oval holes cut through the frame
line at each side alternatively served to
make electrical contact to light the arc
each time the intermittent brought the
picture to rest. This intermittent lighting of
the arc served in place of a shutter but was
not very successful as the electrical spring
contacts scratched the film and the arc
responded irregularly to the quick make
and break.
In the fall of 1897 Enoch J. Rector,
an inventor and promoter, showed
pictures of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons prize
fight in the Academy of Music on 14th
Street in New York City. His apparatus was
called the Veriscope and the same mechanism used to show the pictures was
employed in the camera with which
11,000 feet of film were taken at Carson
City, Nevada, March 17, 1897. Thereafter
about twenty machines for projecting this
large size film were manufactured and
these fight films were exhibited all over the
country.
In the late 90's the motion picture
was regarded as a great novelty which
would soon die out. Conditions were
chaotic and everyone who went into the
business worked with frantic eagerness to
reap the rich harvest before the fickle
interest of the public should pass on to
some new fancy.
Just as there was no standard of
film size, no rate of frames per second was
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established and the taking rate varied from
8 per second to 60 per second among the
different systems, each of which was
distinguished by some fantastic and polysyllabic name. Out of the hundreds of such
coined trade names only a few are remembered today; such as Kinetoscope, Vitagraph, Biograph and Mutoscope.
Subjects were confined almost
entirely to news events, prize-fights, short
scenic shots and theatrical or spectacular
bits many of which were considered very
risque in those conservative days. The May
Irwin Kiss, Little Egypt, Loie Fuller's fire
dance, How Bridget Served the Salad
Undressed and many others brought gasps
of amazement at their audacity.
On November 3, 1899 the JeffriesSharkey fight was held at Coney Island at
night. Wm. A. Brady, now well known in
the theatrical and motion picture world,
and a promoter named O'Rourke sponsored the bout and induced the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company to film
the fight.
The film used was 23⁄4 inches wide
and each frame was 21⁄4 inches high.
Three hundred and twenty feet of this
wide film was used per minute, the perforations being made in the camera at the
instant of taking.
The fight lasted for twenty-five
rounds of three minutes each and more
than seven miles of film were exposed.
Four cameras were on the job so as to
obtain a continuous record. Buckling of the
film in the cameras was frequent although
the film could be watched through a red
glass peep-hole by the light of a small ruby
lamp inside the camera box.
The perforations in the large
Biograph film were used in printing but not
in projecting. The projector pulled the film
down by means of a set of mutilated
rubber rollers and the projectionist had to
watch the frame continuously to prevent
creeping of the frame line on the screen.
In 1897, Oscar B. Depue, partner of
Burton Holmes, purchased a machine in
Paris from Leon Gaumont for taking
60mm-wide film then put up in one
hundred foot lengths, unwinding and
rewinding inside the camera on aluminum
spools - not a daylight proposition, but a
dark room model. This machine he took to
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Italy and the first motion picture turned
out on the machine was of St. Peter's
Cathedral with the fountain playing in the
foreground and a flock of goats passing by
the machine. He then took other pictures
of Rome and from there visited Venice,
where pictures of the canal and Doge's
Palace and the waterfront along the canal
with views of feeding the pigeons at St.
Mark's with the great cathedral in the
background. [...] All the life of that day,
after thirty-two years, is in striking contrast
to the present.
These negatives are still in his
possession although the prints for them
have long since been lost track of on
account of our having changed from that
size of picture to the standard size.
This Gaumont wide film camera was
used for five years by Mr. Depue and most
of the negatives, many of which are of
great historic value, are still in good condition, so that either full size or standard
sized reduction prints can still be made
from them.
Spoor and Berggren have worked
for more than ten years upon a 63mm. film
called Natural Vision pictures.
Widescope first sponsored a double
frame picture on standard film with the
film travel horizontal instead of vertical;
after that an Italian patent was acquired in
which a wide film of about 21⁄4 inches
width is held in cylindrical form about the
axis of rotation of a revolving lens so that
the succeeding frames are photographed
on the same principle as in a panoramic
still camera. Unfortunately this method of
taking pictures introduces the same curvelinear distortion often noticed in Cirkut and
other panoramic still photographs.
Fox Grandeur pictures are 70mm in
width with a frame 48 by 22.5mm, leaving
space available for a sound track about
10mm wide.
Lorenzo Del Riccio, a member of the
society, is perfecting for Paramount the
Magnafilm. This film is 56mm wide and the
frames are 191⁄2mm high.
Several other sizes of wide film are
being used experimentally and other new
sizes are being advocated, but these are
current and not early history and do not
properly belong in this chronicle.
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American Cinematographer - December 2019

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