October 13.
Me belief has prevailed fairly generally that kinematograph exhibitions or moving picture displays are of recent origin, and that it was Mr. Thomas A. Edison who invented this form of spectacular entertainment. This, if the ex-Be-pression be permitted in such u context, is an illu The first moving. picture was, stern moralists will learn, the result of a A Mr, Ead-weard Muybridge, who was born in 1830 and died in 1904, invented what he called the zoopraxiscope, and the first exhibition was given in 1879. The birth of the moving picture in its cruelest form, how-dates back to 1872. Mr.
iybridge, who, by the way, was an Englishman, was in California that year and as a result of a bet he took a succession of photographs to ascertain if, in trotting, all four legs of a horse were ever simul-f|tancously off the ground. The results were exhibited with the ai of a lantern and u zoetrope. Even in that primitive form the alert Americans recognized the possibilities, and the University of Pennsylvania created a" chair" for Mr. Muybridga, and assisted bim to make great progress towards the perfection of his invention. A
connected was the method by whi multiplicity of cameras eloctroally Mr. Maybridge secured an accurate representation of the movements of an animal, and by means of the zoopraxiscope he was able to repro~ duce it upon a screen. Apparently the invention was confined at first to the reproduction of the movements of animule, as the name of Mr. Maybridge's invention suggests, but its value in other directions was quickly realized nad with the acceleration of the movement of photographic shutters there was opened " new vista of possibilities. The genius of Mr. Edison transformed whut was little better than toy into an instrument of instruction, amusement and morality to the influence of which can be set no bounds.
The improvements made in kinematograph apparatus, eve? within the lust five years, have bee" notable. A visit to a moving are display was wont fal pleasure, as the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.