I give the letter in full because it explains why no complete biography of Mrs. Longbow has ever been published. Conscientious Charles, naturally, has been unwilling to write a two-volume life without the essential documents, and Margaret has never put her recollections into a book. Helen Bradford’s pompous work, “The Public and Private Life of My Mother,” hardly serves as a biography; it really gives more information about Mrs. Bradford than about Mrs. Longbow. To supply the public’s need of an intimate picture of the great philanthropist I have here set down my impressions of her. [Illustration] [Illustration] THE WIDENING FIELD OF THE MOVING-PICTURE ITS COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL, AND ARTISTIC VALUE BY CHARLES B. BREWER It has been variously estimated that there are already from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand moving-picture show-places in the United States. Greater New York alone has six hundred. Their development as an industry has been very recent. For while as early as 1864 a French patent was granted to Ducos for a battery of lenses, which, actuated in rapid succession, depicted successive stages of movement, this device could not have fulfilled the requirements of the moving-picture of to-day for the important reason, if for no other, that the dry, sensitized plate of that day could not receive impressions with sufficient rapidity. With the advent of instantaneous photography came what was probably the direct forerunner of the motion-picture in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer who, about 1878, began his camera studies of “The Horse in Motion,”[4] “Animal Locomotion,”[5] and other motion studies. His work was begun in California, on the private race-course of Governor Leland Stanford. Here he employed a battery of twenty-four cameras, spaced a foot apart, the shutters of which were sprung by the horse coming in contact with threads stretched across the track. Mr. Edison’s kinetoscope camera, begun in 1889, was described in court[6] as “capable of producing an indefinite number of negatives on a single, sensitized, flexible film, at a speed theretofore unknown.” In his patent specification, Mr. Edison refers to this speed by saying, “I have been able to take with a single camera and tape film as many as forty-six photographs per second.” A recently published account of what seemed a novel development served to show that other inventors were also busy on the subject nearly twenty years ago. The innovation makes use of glass plates instead of the ordinary films. The pictures are taken in rows, 162 to a plate, and the finished plate resembles a sheet of postage-stamps. Provision is made for carrying eighteen plates and for automatically shifting the plates to take the pictures in proper sequence.