He would have laid the pictures away in his private collection, but someone suggested trying the effect on a Zoetrope (akin to the Kinetoscope) apparatus. The result was so startling that it created something of a public sensation. But, except as a novelty, there was little practical benefit gained. To have made an actual motion picture, lasting even for the space of a single minute, at the rate of twelve exposures per second, the minimum for steady illusion, would have required, under the plan of Muybridge, seven hundred and twenty different cameras. Half a century has passed since that historic day when Muybridge demonstrated that he had a better eye for trotting horses than Senator Stanford and put California on the map as a prominent centre of motion picture progress, a position which that State has most brilliantly maintained. During the fifty years from 1872 to 1922, the period from Muybridge to Griffith, the scientific problems confronting the pioneer inventors of the cinematograph, and they were many and difficult, were solved; and from the crude pictures of a trotting horse in motion were evolved the screen marvels of to-day. The high lights of that crucial half century in the development of the movies, a development that is not only interesting in itself but full of encouragement to the optimist who believes that the new and universal language of the eye may be employed to warn the race against repeating the errors of the past, will be considered in the following chapters of this book. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS _The Movie Learns to Walk—George Eastman’s Great Achievement—The Kinetoscope Goes to England—John W. Paul Throws Motion Pictures on a Screen—London “Bobbies” See the First Movie Ever Shown—America, England and France the Triple Alliance of the Screen._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS