Aberdeen herald. [volume] (Aberdeen, Chehalis County, W.T.) 1886-1917, 1902-01-23
ABOUT THEBIOGRAPH
MACHINE THAT PRODUCES THE
MOVING PICTURES
Great Future for Them in Education
Some of the Uses to Which They
May BE Put - How the Films Are
Made.

There is Il great future for moving
pictures in education. To the inSular
child what more impressive method of
Information as to what Il wa1ship is
| like in all its majesty than to show him
one in notion autobiography! The chill
dren of the Central States will be
shown waves dashing high upon the
strand, or rolling in gentle pillows on
the bathing beach where children are
at play. There are city children, too,
who can be shown harvesting and hay
ing scenes in the great West; cows,
horses. and all animals, wild and tame.
And for both rural and urban young
stcrs the mutoscope will display the
Indian. the Conaman, the Iulu-all
races of men and their manners and
customs. TO the geography class the
mutoscope will display the capes, riv-
ers, 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 disintcgrali0n, Ncsuvius in
eruption, and Niagara reSistless flood.
1t will take the scholar up the Danube
or down the Mississippi, or show him
the wondrouS panUranas of London,
| New York. Paris. Bombay and Canton
life. To the history class the mutO-
scope will show the great personages
Of to-day, as they live and move and
have their being. What more vital sug-
gestion of the war with Spain than the
two views of the Spanish warship Wis
caya-onc showing her at anchor in
New York harbor her captain, in bitter
jest, training his cannon on the city;
the other Il battered wreck upon the
beach of Santiago il 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 Il crank. either by hand
or by an electric motor, the sensitiZed
film passes behind the lens at Il rate of
800 feet per minute. But, to make each
picture, this film must come to a dead
stop for neseventeenth part of sec
ond, during which time the shutter Of
less than the hundredth part of sec.
ond the film moves down about two
inches, and the process is repeated I'M
| til the picture is finished. From one
half a minute to a minute Is sufficient
time to take ordinary scenes in life-mo-
ton. Five hundred or six hundred men
marching eight abreast can pass at a
walk a given point in one minute; and
So in taking life-motion photographs Of
parade, the operator Of the camera
turns on his machine only at the mo-
ment important personages are passing.
Pictures three minutes in length or
longer are often taken, but experience
has shown that long pictures on the bio
graph grow tiresome.
A developed bograph film Is simply a
ribbon of sem-transparent cellulOid
three inches wide. on which appears a
succession of pictures. These pictures
are two inches high and cover the film
to its edges, while between each pic
ture there Is margin of One-siXteenth
of an inch. A picture-flm of scene
that has lasted a minute will be three
inches wide and 800 feet long On it will
be 1900 separate photographs of the
subject. The camera makes exposures
at the rate of thirty distinct snap shots
per second, and the biograph or muto-
scope (by which names the two forms
of reproducing apparatus are distn-
guished) exhibit them to spectators at
the same rate of speed. The eye cannot
detect where one picture joins another.
for they pass at the rate of 1.SOO pic
lures per minute Everybodys Maya
zine.