But Paul was a live wire with a vision, as, years ago, I clairvoyantly called Will H. Hays. He realized that the kinetoscope was, like our dead selves, but a stepping-stone to higher things. It furnished a motion picture to only one observer at a time. What Paul wanted, and what the world has proved that it craved, was a device whereby thousands of spectators could gaze at a movie at one and the same moment. Muybridge had solved the first problem in motion photography, Edison the second, Eastman the third, and Paul was confronted by the fourth, perhaps the most difficult of the quartet. How this resourceful Englishman managed to render the peep-hole of a kinetoscope obsolete and replace it by a screen upon which countless eyes might gaze is a matter of technical and scientific interest, out of place in the story we are telling. Suffice it to say that what he achieved in overcoming the obstacles confronting him has given him a high place on the list of inventors who, one by one, and in widely separated corners of the planet, made possible, during a half century of effort, the motion picture of to-day. We get from Frederick A. Talbot a side-light on an historic episode in London that was the turning-point in the career of Robert W. Paul, and of even greater importance to the human race than any but a few far-seeing movie enthusiasts have yet realized. Says Talbot: About three o’clock one morning, in the early months of 1895, the quietness of Hatton Garden was disturbed by loud and prolonged shouts. The police rushed hurriedly to the building whence the cries proceeded, and found Paul and his colleagues in their workshop, giving vent to whole-hearted exuberance of triumph. They had just succeeded in throwing the first perfect animated pictures upon a screen. To compensate the police for their fruitless investigation, the film, which was forty feet in length, and produced a picture seven feet square, was run through the special lantern for their edification. They regarded the strange spectacle as ample compensation, and had the satisfaction of being the first members of the public to see moving pictures thrown upon the screen. Unfortunately the law-abiding fervor that animates the soul of the London “Bobby” did not get into the camera on that epoch-making night. Had it done so, the early career of the motion picture might have been less objectionable to the guardians of morals on both sides of the Atlantic. But that’s another story—to be told in a later chapter. It is only just to say here, however, that it was not the fault of Robert W. Paul that in their early years the movies went, more or less, to the bow-wows.