The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1901-10-11
MAKING MOVING PICTURES.
Live Motion Views Made by Stop
ping the Film a Fraction
of a Second,

There is great future for moving
pictures in education. To the insular
child what more impressive method of
Information as to what warship is
like in all its majesty than to show
him one in motion photography, says
Everybody's Magazine. The children
of the central states will be shown
waves dashing high upon the strand,
or rolling ingentle pillows on the ba tn
ing beach where children are at play.
There are city children, too, who can
be shown harvesting and haying scenes
in the great west; cows, horses and
all animals, wild and tame. And for
both rural and urban youngsters the
mutoscope will display the Indian, the
Chinaman, the Zulu-all races of men
and their manners and customs. To
the geography class the mutoscope
will display the capes, rivers, cities,
bays, towns and historic buildings that
heretofore have been but names to the
book-dazed scholar. He will be shown
the Muir glacier in its mighty disin-
tegra ton, Vesuvius' in eruption, and
Niagara's resistless flood. 1t will take
the scholar up the Danube or down the
Mississippi, or show him the wondrous
panoramas of London, New York,
Paris, Bombay and Canton life. To the
history class the mutoscope will show
the great personages of to-day as they
live and move and have their being.
What more vital suggestion of the war
with Spain than the two views of the
Spanish warship Viscaya, one showing
her at anchor in New York harbor, her
captain, in bitter jest, training his cam
non on the city, the other a battered
wreck upon the beach of Santiago, a
few weeks later?
Life-motion pictures are made with
one type of camera and projected by
two kinds of machines. The moving
picture camera is arranged so that,
when turned by crank, either by hand
or by an electric motor, the sensitized
film passes behind the lens at a rate
of 800 feet per minute. But to make
each picture, this film must come to q
dead stop for one-seventeenth part of
a second, during which time the shut
ter of the camera opens and closes.
Then in less than the, hundredth part
of a second the film moves down about
two inches, and the process is repeated
until the picture is finished. From one
half a minute to a minute is sufficient
time to take ordinary scenes in life
motion, 500 or 600 men marching eight
abreast can pass at walk a given
point in one minute; and so, in taking
life-motion photographs of a parade,
the operator of the camera turns ON
his machine only at the moment i'm
portant persanages are passing. Pic
lures three minutes in length or longer
are often taken, but experience has
shown that long pictures on the bio
graph grow tiresome.
A developed biograph filling is SIM
ply ribbon of semi-transparent cellu-
loid three inches wide, on which ap-
pears succession of pictures. These
pictures are two inches high and cover
the film to its side edges, while be-
tween each picture there is margin
of one-siXteenth of an inch. A picture
film of a scene that has lasted min
ute will be three inches wide and 800
feet long. On it will be 1900 separate
photographs of the subject. The cam
era makes exposures at the rate of
80 distinct snap shots per second, and
the biograph or mutoscope (by which
names the two forms of reproducing
apparatus are Distinguished exhibit
them to the spectator at the same rate
of speed. The eye cannot detect where
one picture joins another, for they
pass at the rate of 1900 pictures per
minute