Bela Lugosi and his eyes. So many remarkable, recognizable images. At roughly one film per second, the memories speed by with the blessed assurance of a lifetime flashing before the eyes during someone's final fade to black. It's the images we remember most. After all, we're talking about motion pictures.
Movies are only a little bit older than the century itself.
In 1873, England's Eadweard Muybridge used still cameras positioned along a racetrack to capture the movement of a running horse. Twenty-one years later, Fred Ott, an employee of Thomas Edison, captured sneezing on film. In 1895, the Cotton States Exposition, held at what is now Piedmont Park, included a demonstration of motion pictures. Nobody was much interested. If movies are anything, they are popular.