A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DMaj. Woodville Latham (1838 - 1911), and sons, Otway and Grey
 Woodville Latham and his sons Otway (left) and Grey (right) Photo: Ramsaye, T., A Million and One Nights
Woodville Latham (1838-1911) A public showing of a four-minute film takes place in a storefront at 153 Broadway, New York on May 20 of this year (1895). It was a boxing match which had been filmed by Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Grey. The staged fight had been filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The boxers were known as 'Young Griffo' and 'Battling Barnett'. When asked by son Otway Latham whether a scene could be projected on a screen like in the Kinetoscope parlours, father Woodville answered, "You can project anything on a screen that you can see with the naked eye and which can be photographed."
One limitation of early motion-picture filming was the tearing of sprocket holes. The eventual solution to this problem was the addition to the film path of a slack-forming loop that restrained the inertia of the take-up reel. When this so-called Latham Loop was applied to cameras and projectors with intermittent movement, the growth and shrinkage of the loops on either side of the shutter adjusted for the disparity between the stop-and-go motion at the aperture and the continuous movement of the reels.
 The 'Latham Loop' Source: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/tcfnet/courses/gary/t112d01.htm
Small changes often allow big advances and so it was with the Latham loop. Designed by Woodville Latham and marketed by sons Otway and Gray the addition of the loop to the film path, relieves tension caused by longer rolls of film, allowed for the use of films longer than three minutes. The loop is still used in virtually all film cameras and projectors to this day.
An esteemed film industry expert offers his own list of the most influential technical developments of the 20th Century, and explains how they advanced the art of cinematography. A personal survey by David Samuelson
"Perhaps the first important invention after the intermittent film camera itself was the use of top and bottom film loops, without which it was not possible to pull much more than 100' (about two minutes) of film off a roll without tearing the perforations. At the time, the loop made it possible to film an entire boxing bout without tearing the film halfway through the first round. For the filmmakers of the time, it was as big a breakthrough as anything that has happened since.  US Patent No. 707,934, Projecting Kinetoscope Woodville Latham, August 26, 1902 A larger copy may be downloaded
Woodville Latham of the U.S. is usually credited as registering the original patent of the film loop in 1896, but according to a sworn statement by W. K. Laurie Dickson (who was the actual inventor of Thomas Edison's intermittent camera in 1892), Eugene Lauste pioneered the loop in 1895 when he invented the Eidoloscope, the first wide-film projector."Source: Strokes of Genius A personal survey by David Samuelson, American Cinematographer, March 1999. http://www.cinematographer.com/magazine/mar99/genius/pg1.htm
the legal decision as to the above claim...Decided April 9, 1917
U.S. Supreme Court MOTION PICTURE PATENTS CO. v. UNIVERSAL FILM MFG. CO., 243 U.S. 502 (1917) 243 U.S. 502 MOTION PICTURE PATENTS COMPANY, Petitioner, v. UNIVERSAL FILM MANUFACTURING COMPANY et al. No. 715. Argued January 12 and 15, 1917. Decided April 9, 1917. Source: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=243&invol=502
In the United States, the Kinetoscope installation business had reached saturation point by the summer of 1895, although it was still quite profitable for Thomas Edison as a supplier of films. Raff and Gammon persuaded Edison to buy the rights to a state of the art projector, developed by Thomas Armat of Washington, D.C., which incorporated a superior intermittent movement mechanism and a loop-forming device (known as the Latham Loop) to reduce film breakage, and in early 1896 Edison began to manufacture and market this machine, the Vitascope, as his own invention. Given its first public demonstration on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, the Edison Vitascope brought projection to the United States and established the format for American film exhibition for the next several years. Edison was later to publicly credit Armat with the invention of the Vitascope
Early filmmaking in New York City was also pursued by other former associates of Edison: from May 1895 Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Gray produced pictures for their eidoloscope projector 35 Frankfort Street in Manhattan
You may also wish to read the essay A Million and One Nights by Terry Ramsaye located on this site
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