The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-12-27
Moving Pictures Are More Than Two
 Hundred Years Old

While our ancestors of two cen turies ago would doubtless be quite overcome with awe and wonder if they could be permitted to witness modern motion picture show, we of today err in concluding that the nov ies were utterly unknown to them This is the 2O6th anniversary of the first known reference to motion pie lures as a form of popular entertain ment, for the Tatler of Dec 27, 170S, contains an advertisement of a, movie theatre in the Strand. The an nouncement, headed Never Seen Be fore." invites the public to witness traordinary Master, which has many curious and wonderfully pleasing and surprising motions in it, all natural. ''The advertisement further assures the reader that the picture'' is after the manner of the Foreign Moving Picture formerly shown in Fleet St., but with greater variety, and far ex- ceeding that The following year the press of London gave publicity to tt a now moving picture, drawn by the best hand, with great variety of curious motions and figures, which form a most agreeable prospect.'
 John Gay, the poet. who began his literary cateer two centuries ago, in dicates in one of his verses, that these early movies were a develop ment of the magic lanterns:
 ~In darkened rooms. where light can
 only pass
 Through the small, circle of a con-
 vex glass;
 On the white sheet the moving fig. The forest waves, clouds float along
 the skies
 These early and crude '.movies'' were very popular for a time, but their vogue was short, as the pub lie soon tired of trees that seemed to wave or clouds that f1oated. The genesis of the moving picture goes back much further than two centur- ies ago. Edison's kinetograph. an apparatus for taking pictures of nov ing> objects, is development, through the photographic camera, of the camera obscura invented by Rog- CT Bacon, the father of English sci ence in the thirteenth century. Edi- sons kinetoscope, the apparatus for the exhibition of the pictures taken by the Photograph, had it's germ in the magic lantern, the invention of which is also ascribed to Bacon. The inventor of the camera obscura and many other epochal inventions was a. friar, but he was accused of heresy and the practice of black magic be- cause of his scientific work, and was 
 lantern was considered device of the devil, and it passed out of use and was re-invented by Athanasius Kfrcher in the seVenteeth century.
 The first movies were magic lam tern exhibitions of pictures, portions of which were movable. Much i'm genuity was displayed by the artists who produced these pictures, but they were necessarily very limited in scope, and the motion pictures of two centuries ago would serve but to ex- cite the disabilities of the movie pa- irons of today. The germ of the great idea was there, however, and it reached fruition in the fertile brain of Edison, who invented the kinetograph and the kinetoscope in 1894 So great has been the de- velopment of the motion picture in- dustry that already the names ap- piled to the taking and exhibition of such pictures have been well nigh forgotten, and a s'kinetoscope exhfbi- tion'' would mean little or nothing to the rising generation of movie fans