A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

Woodville Latham and his sons Otway (left) and Grey (right)

Among the young men who passed up and down the Broadway of 1894 in quest of their diversions were Grey and Otway Latham, brothers and beaux gallant from Old Virginia. The Lathams were handsome blades of the dashing type which fits the romantic picture of the South that was, graceful land of longuor and luxury, of jasmine bowered, white columned verandas looking out on spacious lawns and vistas of ancient live oaks.

Grey and Otway Latham were born perhaps a century after their proper period into an era of alien work-a-day spirit. Economic exiles from the land of the julep and the fox hunt, they were now a part of the rising turmoil of Manhattan, the metropolis of the work-cursed Yankee. They were sons of a distinguished Southerner, Woodville Latham of the Lathams of Northcliffe, Virginia. To the history of the motion picture he has been obscurely known as Professor Latham, but in the annals of the Old South he is pridefully named as Major Latham, sir!

Mostly, Major Latham's family hopes had gone down with many another Southern pride at the surrender of Lee at Appomattox Court House. Major Latham, as well became his traditions, had served the Confederacy and its lost cause ably, first as a major of artillery in the field and then as the executive officer of the great Southern arsenal at Columbus, in Georgia. Before the war Major Latham had been devoted to the sciences, especially the study of chemistry. He had wealth and leisure and an introspective bent.

He was one of fifteen heirs of Woodville Latham, the elder, to share in the inheritance of ruined estates in the sad aftermath of the War of the Rebellion. Even so, he had a competency to be supplemented by the earnings of a commercial application of his scientific pursuits. With the war behind him, business beckoned to the Major. The BaItimore & Ohio lines invited him to become the resident engineer in charge between Pittsburgh and Chicago. This would have meant going into the North.

It may have been the Southerner in him, or mayhap the scholar, which made him reject the appointment to take the chair of chemistry and physics at the University of West Virginia, at a professor's salary. Financial pressure increased. Latham's three sons, Percy, Grey and Otway were young collegians now, members of the Major's classes. The were learning the merry life and acquiring expensive tastes. They were handsome, high strung and headstrong. The world was theirs and the took it.

Major Latham found he could not keep pace with the growing demands upon him and with considerable reluctance abandoned his professorship with its pleasant retirements in collegiate balls and laboratories to plunge into business. With the remnants of his fortune Major Latham established his sons in a drug business in Nashville, Tennessee, and himself set out to engage in dealings in real estate. After all, his sons were young with the world all ahead of them and the Major was ready to sacrifice himself and his scholarly, cloistered life to them and the aggressive new era of after-the-war.

But fortune was unkind alike to the sons' drug business and the Major's real estate efforts, which had taken him variously to Chattonooga and St. Louis. Percy and Grey and Otway were still playboys, with no heart for business. And the Major would rather have been back in his study or over the bench in his laboratory deep in test tubes and valencies. In the year of the Kinetoscope we discover Grey and Otway Latham in New York, drawn toward the maelstrom of the new economic era and gay Broadway.

They had swiftly gone through the assets of their drug concern in Tennessee and were now employees, Grey with the drug house of Parke, Davis & Company, Otway with the Tilden Drug Company. Otway had established a friendship with Samuel J. Tilden, Jr., nephew of the celebrated Samuel J. Tilden, once the governor of New York and Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, defeated by a Republican recount of the ballots of 1876.

Major Latham, now in failing health, had followed on to New York with his sons and was living with them at the Hotel Bartholdi, at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-third street, still hopefully advising them and promising himself an upturn in the rapidly ebbing tide of Latham fortunes. He had with him a handful of his books, reliquaries and symbols of this life he had put behind him, following the service of his sons and their flaming youth.

The old habits of the library and laboratory followed him and through the long hours of the night be sat still desultorily pursuing his researches with the clangour of Broadway in his ears and the lights of Madison Square Garden across the park flashing in front of his window. He hoped to re-establish himself in this alien soil and time. Now came another Southern youth, Enoch Rector, who had been a classmate of the Latham brothers under their father at the University of West Virginia. Rector had completed his technical education aimed at engineering and now he was back from a tour of Europe to begin his career. Grey and Otway Latham greeted their classmate with southern enthusiasm and proceeded to show him the town.

Among the wonders of Broadway was the Kinetoscope Parlour at 1155 Broadway where the dragon in electric lights, with a green eye and red tongue, was proclaiming the wonders of the new Edison wizardry, the living pictures in a peep show. The three adventuring young Virginians turned in at the sign of the dragon and saw the little forty-foot pictures of Mme. Bertholdi tying herself in knots, Mlle. Capitaine revealing her agility on the trapeze, the cockfight, and all the rest of that primitive program."There, that's a business to get into," Grey Latham exclaimed to Rector as the emerged. "I'll tell you what everybody's crazy about prize fights, and all we have to do is to get Edison to photograph a fight for this machine and we can take it out and make a fortune on it."

That was a moment of destiny for the motion picture. Amazing consequences and many of the controlling events of all subsequent screen history have their roots in that trifling moment that summer evening on Broadway in 1894. It has also filled the complex annals of the screen with a whole sequence of poignant life dramas.

The impulse crystallised into a plan and organisation. After some preliminary inquiries at the Edison plant, Otway and Grey Latham, Samuel J. Tilden, Jr., and Enoch Rector formed the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, for the special purpose of exploiting special peep show machines with prize fight pictures. It seems that it was on this restricted and special basis that the deal escaped the strictures of the prior Edison contract with Norman C. Raff of the International Novelty Company and the Kinetoscope Company.

Tilden and the two Lathams were busy with the affairs of their employment in the drug business. It was agreed that the should stay by their pasts and the assured incomes there from, while Rector who was just casting about for a connection, should actually take up the project. Rector's technical education now stood him in good stead. It was obvious that the Kinetoscope, limited as it was to the Kinetograph's output of about fifty feet of negative at a single loading, could not portray a round of a prize fight.

Both the camera and the viewing machine had to be given a new scope in the recording of events in behalf of the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company's new project. This technical fact is worthy of emphasis. It made the prize ring and pugilism the major influence in the technical evolution of the motion picture for the entire first decade of the art. Incidental effects and influences, equally important but less tangible, have followed through the years.

The influence of the prize ring extended to and overlapped into a period of the increasing importance of the dramatic functions of the screen. It is noteworthy, too, that it was the interest of the blithe Lathams which started the motion picture along the sporty primrose path. The outstanding fact is that they saw the motion picture as the means of re-creating the event of a prize fight, containing the emotional stimulus the most desired. This was the birth of production policy for the motion picture.

It was, as this proved, too limited. The prize ring was a man's sport. In thirty years production policy has evolved to the point where all motion pictures are built about the event of supreme emotional stimulus to both sexes. But that idea was not entirely overlooked even in these early days, as we shall in due season observe. In order to get the prize fight into the limitations of the motion picture, Rector, working at the Edison plant, tripled the scope of the Kinetoscope, getting a capacity of one hundred and fifty feet of film, and then planned a prize fight of abbreviated rounds.

One morning in July, 1894, the world's first prize fight pictures were staged at the Black Maria in West Orange. Michael Leonard, then known as "the Beau Brummel of the prize ring," met Jack Cushing, a likely contender for the lightweight title. They fought in a ten-foot ring. The went about ten of the snappy short rounds, of which the Kinetograph recorded six. At the finish, Cushing was trapped by a feint and fell under a chop to the jaw. Nearly a thousand feet of film had been made.

It was by far the longest motion picture that had yet been attempted. External pressure and enterprise had already set out to take the motion picture industry out of the hands of Edison under whose auspices it had just been born. In less than six months he lost his exclusive control of the art, and in twenty-three years his name was to pass from the screen as a maker of pictures. In August, 1894, the Latham, Rector-Tilden enterprise opened the parlour of the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company at 83 Nassau street in downtown New York.

Six big special Kinetoscopes stood in a row in a store room. Each contained a round of the Leonard-Cushing fight. A sign was put in the window and a barker stood at the door proclaiming the wonders of "the living pictures of the great prize fight." New York was hungry to see. Throngs packed the place, and by the second day long lines of waiting patrons trailed back into the street. The police came to keep order. In the vernacular of the show business, the were "holding them out."

The Latham brothers were started on their way to a swift transient burst of prosperity. There were lively nights along Broadway. Pretty girls, dinners at the Hoffman House, and a considerable sprinkling of champagne. With a hopeful, indulgent interest the father, Woodville Latham, looked on. He was anxious and wondering. The Leonard-Cushing fight pictures which started out so bravely began to lose their drawing power.

A production problem had arisen for the first time in the new art. A change of program was needed. The decision was an obvious one, another prize fight, but a bigger and better one. The Latham lads knew everybody on Broadway, including James Corbett, then in the glory of heavyweight stardom. Corbett was a bigger name than Leonard. The were looking for box office value. The Kinetoscope Exhibition Company made an arrangement with Corbett to fight Pete Courtney of Trenton, New Jersey, before the camera.

The contract specified that Corbett was not to be photographed for any other Kinetoscope concern. It was an exclusive contract and the first in the world. Meanwhile Enoch Rector, the production manager of the enterprise, laid down the specifications of the fight. The had taken their chances on what the could photograph of the very genuine fight between Leonard and Cushing. That was pure reporting. Now the wanted to be assured of results by a further pre-determining of the event to be recreated by the living pictures.

It was therefore decided that the fight should go precisely six rounds of one minute each and that the sixth should be concluded by a handsome knockout delivered by the star, James Corbett. And so it was done. The picture neatly fitted the machines. This pre-arranged prize fight was thus the ancestor of dramatic construction for the motion picture. Here was the first glimmering of creative motion picture effort, the first step toward having things happen for the camera rather than merely photographing events ordained by other forces.

The Lathams grew impatient of the slow trickle of spectators past the battery of peep show machines with the pictures of the Corbett Courtenay fight. The wanted to be able to show the pictures on the wall to a whole room full of patrons at once. The money would come faster that way. Like many another back along the line of the zoetrope experimenters of the century before, the thought of the magic lantern, that Magia Catoptrica of Athanasius Kircher of I640 by now electrified and rechristened the Stereopticon. This was a technical task, and with this idea came the notion that their father, Professor Woodville Latham, would be able to perform it for them.

One day in September, 1894, Otway Latham induced his father to visit the Kinetoscope parlour in Nassau street. "You see, if we could project that picture on a sheet, like the stereoptican slides, there'd be a fortune in it. Can we do it?" "You can project anything on a screen that you can see with the naked eye and which can be photographed," replied Woodville Latham. He was very positive in his answer. He was also very correct.

Woodville Latham had only a casual academic knowledge of optics and photography. He was a chemist. Naturally neither be nor his sons knew anything of any of the prior efforts of the motion picture toward projection. The Edison experiments aimed at the screen were now same years in the discard, buried among the note books in the big laboratories in West Orange. The Lathams and Rector set to work to take the motion picture out of Edison's little black peep show box and to put it on the screen.

The making of the projected motion picture of the theatre screen, the entertainment of the millions of to-day, began then and there. The force of commercial ambition was taking up the burden of the problem of the living picture where Edison had laid it down. It was inevitable that the motion picture should be carried forward now to the screen. Edison had paused just before the shortest but most important step. He put out the little Kinetoscope to make money and sacrificed a golden empire.

The Lathams, to be sure, were not the only opportunists to see a glimmering of greater things beyond the peep show Kinetoscope. Close upon them came other builders upon the Edison idea whose efforts were presently to make a battleground of the screen. It appears to have been Otway Latham who took the aggressive hand in the matter of conducting the effort to put the kinetoscopic picture on the screen. Otway was impatient and impetuous, and his methods were those of simple propinquity.

He went to the Edison plant again and made friends with the man he judged knew most about the motion picture-William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. It was Otway who chose the location of the workshop laboratory where the Latham experiments were to be conducted. He found space in the Scott Building at 35 Frankfort street, a little old four story red brick structure of Civil War days, old when the Brooklyn Bridge towering above it was opened to traffic.

The Latham laboratory was at the top of the last flight of stairs in a space twelve by fifteen feet. Otway cast about for a mechanic to build their experimental projection machines and naturally sought one who might know something about what was known of the motion picture. He employed Eugene Lauste, a Frenchman who had worked on the Edison phonograph, and had from time to time done a bit in Room Five at West Orange.

Lauste, if the court records of subsequent litigation are to be accepted, was not thoroughly in the good graces of everybody at the Edison plant. He appears to have been friendly with Dickson, with whom he had been associated at times long subsequent to their motion picture affairs. Lauste went to work in the shop, along with Raphael Netter, a draughtsman employed to sketch out Professor Latham's ideas. Lauste literally lived with his work and slept on a cot in the corner of the little room. He expected a share in the fortune which seemed to loom ahead.

Otway Latham meanwhile was busy at reconnoitring errands in West Orange. He wanted to know all that could be learned there about this motion picture. He would let his slow, patient old father figure it out with midnight vigils over the drafting table if he could, but there might be a swifter method. This blithe young Southerner made a less interested friendship with William E. Gilmore, then general manager of the Edison enterprises at West Orange.

Gilmore, big of stature and with a belligerent personality, had just been called to West Orange from a post with the Edison General Electric Works at Schenectady, N. Y. He was due at West Orange an April I, 1894. He reported promptly at his new desk at 8 o'clock an the morning of April 2. "I wasn't going to start anything on April Fool's Day," he explained. It may be set down here that this is probably the first and last evidence of anything akin to superstition in all the brass tacks career of William E. Gilmore.

Gilmore's first official act has not been recorded, but it is a safe assumption that he brought down a hard fist on a surprised desk and demanded action. There was neither superstition nor sentiment in the new order of things at West Orange under Gilmore. He found that Edison, between his good nature and his concentration an scientific affairs, had allowed many to impose upon him.

Meanwhile the Edison interests had been increasing in magnitude and complexity. There were problems of financing and administration. It is not that Edison might not have been able to cope with these problems, but rather that his stronger interests were elsewhere. Among other elements of the situation was a maze of patent Litigations It seems to have been painfully true that every important patented development from the Edison laboratories was sure to result in a flock of competing clauses, seldom in good faith and not a few of them downright frauds conceived in criminal cleverness. The conspicuous successes of Edison made him an object of continuous attack. "Damn the patents, give me the goods with your name on it and we will do business," was Gilmore's advice.

It is not testimonial to the court-made justice that the thousands upon thousands expended by Edison in defensive litigation probably never saved him a penny or gave him a nickel's worth of protection as measured by ultimate results. The immediate crisis in Edison affairs which had brought Gilmore to the general managership was due to the erratic commercial course of the North American Phonograph Company. That concern for merchandising reasons and competitions involving patent issues, had threatened to engulf the whole Edison institution in ruin. It was a situation which called for a strict dictator and rigid discipline. Gilmore was the iron man of the hour.

Gilmore started some house cleaning and some merchandising. He had campaign plans of his own to carry through. He was disposed to be friendly toward Otway Latham on two counts. Latham was a customer also he was an entertaining and cordial young man. He breathed the spirit of Broadway and the gaiety of the period. He was a contact for Gilmore with this amusement world, in which it seemed probable that the Kinetoscope was likely to figure. It was also to be noted that Otway Latham was being rather aggressively friendly toward Dickson. Also, Gilmore began to disagree with Dickson at once.

CHAPTER NINE: DANCING BUTTERFLIES-INTRIGUE

The friendship between the young Lathams and W. E. Gilmore had same rather direct effects an the whole course of the motion picture through its reaction an the production at the Edison studio under Gilmore's supervision. The early Latham successes with the Leonard, Cushing and Corbett-Courtenay fight pictures led to the making of a number of minor bouts at the Black Maria for Raff & Gammon of the Kinetoscope Company, which is not to be confused with the Latham-Rector-Tilden Kinetoscope Exhibition Company.

And yet further, and more interesting, the keen enthusiasm of Otway and Grey Latham for persons under the bright lights of Broadway led the Edison "Black Maria" studio to beckon into the films many of the gay butterflies of the stage who smiled an the handsome young Virginians. Since the Lathams' Kinetoscope Exhibition Company had launched the prize fight pictures for the peep show with such success in their downtown parlour, Raff and Gammon of the Kinetoscope Company, with its uptown demonstration parlour an Broadway, sought to give competition with a real stellar fight.

Now, as we have noted, the Latham-Corbett deal was exclusive, and Corbett could not be pictured for Raff and Gammon and their customers. Corbett, the handsome "Gentleman Jim" of the prize ring, was the first in the world to sign a motion picture star contract. It is remarkable that when Corbett recently wrote his autobiography, "The Roar of the Crowd," be had forgotten his early ring appearances before the camera, and cited the battle of his defeat, same years later, as the first to be photographed for the screen.

Bearing on this star contract situation of the first film year there is interest in the discovery among the old Kinetoscope Company records of a contract memorandum drawn up September, 1894, by which one Hugh Bevan was employed at a contingent $3,000 a year to frame a fight between "such first class fighters as Corbett, Jackson, Fitzsimmons, M'Auliffe, Griffo, Dixan or Maher, and a suitable Opponent."

The old contract, still without the date filled in, bears the signatures of Behan and two attorneys, Frank Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus, 44 Pine Street, New York, who were soon to share in the selling of the Kinetoscope with Raff and Gammon of the Kinetoscope Company. Evidently the contract was never signed by Norman Charles Raff for the Kinetoscope Company and International Novelty Company. The project produced no picture fights and was soon forgotten under the pressure of other more urgent affairs. The peep show days and companies were soon to pass.

There was, incidentally, an entirely mechanical reason for the persistent popularity of the prize fight as an early motion picture subject. The picture taking machine was not the facile portable instrument of today. It was a vast bulky device of about the dimensions of a large dog house. It was heavy. It had a rather fixed viewpoint. It could not be swung to cover panoramas, and it could not be tilted up and down to follow moving centers of interest. It had about the same pictorial availability as a knothole in a ballfield fence.

The ropes of the prize ring automatically limited the radius of action. It was simple to set the ponderous camera to cover the ring. The cameraman could then grind away, secure in the certainty that the picture was not getting away from him, unless indeed the combatants jumped the ropes and ran away. Far the same photographic reasons dance acts were especially available for the camera of the period of the Kinetograph, as Edison called his picture taking machine. Also, New York was as dance mad then as since. But in this period the performance was left to professionals an the stage, to be enjoyed vicariously from the comfort of music hall seats.

The Columbian Exposition at Chicago had brought to our hospitable shores some of the best work of the justly famous Oriental movements perfected an the North African coast. Both more and less versions were being presented for years after at New York shows. To Koster & Bial's Music Hall at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, where the Macy store now stands, came Carmencito, a dancer after the Spanish manner, and a sensation of notional scope in those days of 1895-96.

A few squares away in Twenty-third Street at the Eden Musee a damsel of lithesome grace known as Otero was presented in ardent rivalry. Self appointed committees of the sport we gentry of old New York, in their long-tailed coats and silk hats, spent a deal of time comparing the merits of the dancers, and to this day it is impossible to get a real decision an their relative merits. But this vast interest did result in one milestone for our history of the motion picture. Carmencito was drafted for the films.

She went to West Orange and performed before the Kinetograph. The screen born verb "to vamp" was then coined, but the art itself was well established. Annabelle Moore, another beauty of considerable music ball fame under the name of Annabelle-the-Dancer performed a little fifty-foot version of her act an the Edison stage Annabelle appeared in the serpentine dance, wafting and manipulating endless yards of silken draperies. On the variety theatre stage this was one of the most popular numbers. The dancer was illuminated with changing shafts of colored light thrown by tinted slides in a stereopticon.

The Edison pictures were led into the first screen endeavours at colour in imitation of the stage effect. Many of the prints of the Annabelle picture were tinted with slide colours by hand, a frame at a time, a most tedious process. This hand tinting screen colour has continued for special purposes ever since. It has never attained, however, any particular importance in the screen art. It occurs only as a symptom of desire. Annabelle was photographed for the peep show Kinetoscope, but within a few months both a revolution in the picture art and same exciting developments in her own career were destined to combine in making her the first celebrity of the motion pictures.

Otway Latham and Dickson talked motion picture a great deal in this period. Young Latham was afire with the possibilities of profit which seemed to be promised by showing pictures an a screen. Dickson was not, it seemed possible, entirely aware of what the Lathams were trying to do toward projection. But his conversations at least indicated to Otway Latham an enthusiastic anticipation that projection was possible and immensely desirable. Dickson discussed same of his still continuing experiments. He told Otway of a plan be had to use a film and same Kinetoscope parts for an experiment in projection at Columbia University's laboratories.

"I could not get enough light through the I3-inch diameter shutter with a 1/8-inch slot by the use of my Zeiss focus arc lamp and I mentioned this to my good friend, the Rev. C. H. Mann of Orange, N. J., who advised me to go and see his son, Professor Riborg Mann at Columbia College and bring a sample, and he would give me all the light I wanted,"

"Professor Latham and his sons were having supper at my house, I66 Cleveland street, Orange, and heard him say what I intended to do," continues Dickson. "I wasn't sure at the top if I should give way to the Professor (Latham's) insistent request to be allowed to come. Anyway he came and Prof. Riborg Mann was awfully kind in running wires and screwing up the two little rollers for a short band to go over. A tin shutter was made and spun around the front of the film, and light was shoved an more and more-a small condenser held by me-the projecting lens in front of the high speed shutter-all simply to try and see what the loss of light was through an l/8-inch slot. Question, why-as I had carte blanche to experiment-was this Columbia College affair under such auspices and so openly conducted, so misconstrued afterward?"

The motion picture was demanding to be liberated from the little black box. Raff communicated this demand to Edison.

"No," replied the Wizard, "if we make this screen machine that you are asking far, it will spoil everything. We are making these peep show machines and selling a lot of them at a good profit. If we put out a screen machine there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States. With that many screen machines you could show the pictures to everybody in the country-and then it would be done. Let's not kill the goose that lays the golden egg."

The Kinetoscope Company was insistent. At last a concession was made. Edison would see about getting up a screen machine. Now an odd thing happened. Dickson, who had conducted all of the motion picture experiments up to this time, was not consulted. Rather secretly, at least so far as Dickson was concerned, Charles H. Kayser, one of the several mechanics who had done same of the tinkering in Room Five, was set to work to evolve a projection machine. Instead of working in the Edison laboratory where he might have been discovered by Dickson, Kayser was sent over to the offices of the Kinetoscope Company in the Postal Telegraph building in New York.

A large room an the mezzanine adjacent to the Kinetoscope general office was taken for his work. It is just possible that one of Edison's ideas was to put Kayser right under the noses of Raff and Gammon in his work, thus tending to satisfy their clamour for a projection machine. Kayser struggled an and an, spraying flickering pictures an the ceiling wall and floor as his reconstructed peep show Kinetoscope tried to learn to throw at the screen. Raff complained at the slow progress."I could go in there and make that thing work inside of a week, if I wanted to take the time to it myself," Edison replied. "Maybe he'll get it pretty soon." Edison was in no hurry.

Meanwhile Dickson learned with surprise through grapevine channels of the Kayser project over in New York, and thereafter saw to it that Kayser had no opportunity to learn of what had been worked out in Room Four or elsewhere in his experiments. Now the Lathams began to urge Dickson to join them in the building of a projection machine. Things were not going very promisingly in the little workshop at 35 Frankfort street. If later testimony is correct, Dickson yielded a shade to the Latham in partitioning and broached to Edison the idea of joining them in a projection machine effort.

Edison is quoted as replying that be could not consider such a step since he was under contract to the Kinetoscope Company for all of his motion picture devices. Still the Lathams persisted and thrust upon Dickson an offer of a quarter interest in their project. Dickson hesitated and demurred. He was receiving a salary of thirty dollars a week from Edison, rather a fair figure in those days, and had prospect of a share in the Edison motion picture enterprises whatever the might prove to be.

Professor Latham in December of this year of 1894, seeking to finance his affairs and put them into businesslike shape, decided to form a company. With a degree of modesty that has not always characterised the christening of motion picture corporations since, he translated the "L" of Latham into Greek and incorporated the Lambda Company. Perhaps too he realised the classic flavour of it. The distinct character of the Lambda Company as apart from the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, the earlier peep show enterprise, which included Rector and Tilden, must be borne in mind to avoid confusion over subsequent events.

A new parting of the ways was almost in sight. Rector and Tilden were not in entire accord with the fancy which Grey and Otway had for the life of Broadway. Rector continued yet a while in the background of Latham affairs but be was planning a course of his own. It was Professor Latham's intent that his Lambda stock should go to his sons, and to them be looked considerably for the execution of the business affairs of the undertaking. Otway Latham, pursuant to offers of a quarter interest in the project to Dickson, turned over the stock certificates for safekeeping in the hands of Edmond Cougar Brown, a lawyer and friend of Dickson. Dickson, doubting and wondering, was not ready to accept it in his own hands.

The Latham experiments started, like every other subsequent attempt at projection, with films from the Edison Kinetoscope, the ready made camera record. The first efforts at 35 Frankfort street were very much like Dickson's experiment with the powerful arc lamps at Columbia University, made with the continuously running movement of the Kinetoscope. As Latham reached for a better effect he was influenced by the lantern slides of the stereopticon and decided that a large size picture would he desirable. The larger area would compensate in same degree for the great loss of light incurred in trying to project an the screen with the little Edison films in the continuously moving Kinetoscope mechanism.

To those technically unfamiliar with the motion picture it is necessary to point out that this, the real vital principle of today's perfected projection was not even yet discovered, and that the Latham's' concept was still of a continuously running film in the projection machine. The step by step principle had been adopted for the camera by sheer force of photo-chemical necessity. The film had to be stopped to let the light soak in, but it was not as yet known that the same thing had to be done for the eye. Latham was therefore trying to attain the visual effect by increasing the volume of light which passed through the picture to the screen.

The final solution, which he was not to reach, was to be through an increase of duration, rather than of volume. Since be wanted a larger picture to let more light through to the screen, Latham had to abandon the use of Edison's little Kinetoscope films and plan the building of a bigger camera, an amplified edition of Edison's Kinetograph. At the same time Professor Latham inquired of the Eastman plant in Rochester for film stock of such a size as be required.

He learned to his dismay that it would be necessary to buy a whole "table" of film, that is to say, one pouring of the Eastman film an the big on hundred-foot glass table of the Rochester factory. This entailed an alarming outlay for the Lambda Company. Latham set out to have Lauste construct a camera which could use a strip of film approximately one and a half times the width of the Edison standard. One of the puzzles of camera building for the Lathams was the matter of intermittently stopping the film, frame by frame, to allow the light to impress the image. They had learned enough to know that the continuous movement of the peep show Kinetoscope machine would not permit satisfactory recording of motion.

Otway went ingratiatingly to Dickson. Dickson was trying to steer a middle course and avoid revealing too much of his work and at the same time be felt a certain friendship toward the Lathams, more especially toward the father. Otway did come away from Dickson with at least the wisp of a hint that there was a very old movement used by Swiss watchmakers, known as the Geneva cross, which would give an intermittent motion from a continuously revolving shaft. This was hastily communicated to Lauste in the Frankfort street shop for the benefit of the new camera.

It was late in January of the year of 1895 when the machine took more promising form, and a model was hurried into construction. Work went an night and day as the Lathams hung over Lauste's workbench. Woodville Latham was breaking under the strain of his attention. He had weakened heart action, resulting from his ordeals in the Civil War and from his addiction to strong black coffee to aid him in his laboratory vigils. Far days on end he was forced to keep to his bed at the Hotel Bartholdi.

Late in the night of February 26, Otway Latham and Dickson, saw an occasional visitor in Frankfort street, and Lauste gathered about the work bench to look over the new camera. It was time to try it out. They threaded it with same of the precious wide gauge film from Eastman, and turned the machine on an electric lamp. Otway Latham swung the lamp by its cord, while Dickson turned the crank.

With feverish haste they extinguished the lamps and put the film into the developing bath. There was a tense wait, and then the image began to come up in the developer. It had a clearly defined series of images of the swinging incandescent lamp. It was a demonstration that they could make a picture. The problem of getting it an the screen was yet before them. Thus far they had done only what Edison had done before them. But it was progress.

They had what they thought would be a better film for projection. After an uncomfortable, restless night, Woodville Latham awakened early the next morning. It was not yet daylight. He consulted his watch and found it was five o'clock. When he turned up the gas be caught a glimpse of a note that had been pushed under the door. Folded within it was a bit of film with the pictures of the electric light and a notation:

To my friend, Woodville Latham: