Nothing further need be said in regard to the importance of the general subject we have under consideration. A medium for expression which makes its imprint weekly upon the minds of approximately one half of our population is worthy of the closest study by the people of this country. Its origin, its early growth, its present status and its future as a universal language, destined, perhaps, to be the greatest civilizing medium the race has known, are topics the timely importance of which can hardly be overrated. To paraphrase an old political truism, as goes the screen so goes the country—and, possibly, the race at large. Briefly the early history of the cinematograph is in substance as follows: By the revolutionary achievement of the Frenchman Daguerre, who discovered a method whereby sunlight could be made to fix a permanent image of an object upon a sensitized surface, a door was opened showing the way to the marvellous triumphs that the last century has vouchsafed to the camera. But impasse after impasse checked the progress of the pioneers of photography. When Daguerre began his historic career as the first photographer, an exposure of six hours—more than twenty thousand seconds—was required to obtain a permanent impression of the object photographed. Instantaneous photography seemed at that time as remote a possibility as photography in colors appeared to be but a short time ago. But the time came when Chemistry, the mother of modern marvels, solved the problem confronting the early photographers. The laboratory found a surface so sensitive to light that it could take and retain a picture perfect in detail in less than one thousandth part of a second—a feat which in Daguerre’s time would have required an exposure twenty million times as long. How important in connection with the eventual advent of the motion picture was Man’s mastery of the time-element in photography is tersely explained by Frederick A. Talbot, an authority on the early history of the cinematograph, as follows: The wonderful achievement of instantaneous photography assumed at first a scientific rather than a commercial value. Many a “snap-shot” is taken which does not betray whether the plate has been exposed for six hours or only one-thousandth of a second; but, on the other hand, a “snap-shot” of a quickly moving object may seize upon and fix an interesting characteristic motion. It was this fact which led certain ingenious minds to perceive in instantaneous photography a valuable means of analyzing motion. If a single photograph reproduced the exact posture of a moving object at any given instant of time, they argued that a series of such photographs, if taken in sufficiently rapid succession, would form a complete record of the whole cycle of movements involved, for instance in the jump of a horse or the flap of a bird’s wing.