The Romance of Modern Invention: Containing Interesting Descriptions in Non-technical Language of Wireless Telegraphy, Liquid Air, Modern Artillery, Submarines, Dirigible Torpedoes, Solar Motors, Airships, &c. &c.Williams, Archibald
Science
The Romance of Modern Invention: Containing Interesting Descriptions in Non-technical Language of Wireless Telegraphy, Liquid Air, Modern Artillery, Submarines, Dirigible Torpedoes, Solar Motors, Airships, &c. &c.
Williams, Archibald
Inventions
The Living Picture has even been impressed into the service of the
British Empire to promote emigration to the Colonies. Three years ago
Mr. Freer exhibited at the Imperial Institute and in other places in
England a series of films representing the 1897 harvest in Manitoba.
Would-be emigrants were able to satisfy themselves that the great
Canadian plains were fruitful not only on paper. For could they not
see with their own eyes the stately procession of automatic “binders”
reaping, binding, and delivering sheaves of wheat, and puffing engines
threshing out the grain ready for market? A far preferable method this
to the bogus descriptions of land companies such as lured poor
Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley into the deadly swamps of “Eden.”
Again, what more calculated to recruit boys for our warships than the
fine Polytechnic exhibition known as “Our Navy”? What words, spoken or
printed, could have the effect of a series of vivid scenes truthfully
rendered, of drills on board ship, the manning and firing of big guns,
the limbering-up of smaller guns, the discharge of torpedoes, the
headlong rush of the “destroyers”?
The Mutoscope, to which reference has been made above, may be found in
most places of public entertainment, in refreshment bars, on piers,
in exhibitions, on promenades. A penny dropped into a slot releases a
handle, the turning of which brings a series of pictures under
inspection. The pictures, enlarged from mutograph films, are mounted
in consecutive order round a cylinder, standing out like the leaves of
a book. When the cylinder is revolved by means of the handle the
picture cards are snapped past the eye, giving an effect similar to
the lifelike projections on a biograph screen. From 900 to 1000
pictures are mounted on a cylinder.
The advantages of the mutoscope--its convenient size, its simplicity,
and the ease with which its contents may be changed to illustrate the
topics and events of the day--have made the animated photograph
extremely popular. It does for vision what the phonograph does for
sound. In a short time we shall doubtless be provided with handy
machines combining the two functions and giving us double value for
our penny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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