Oh, the parties we used to have.

In those days, the public wanted us to live like kings and queens, so we did.

And why not?

Gloria Swanson.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 242.

Dues, don'ts, and be carefuls.

Today I want to talk about the motion picture industry.

This is a topic we've touched upon before in the podcast, though perhaps I haven't paid as much attention to it as I should have.

We talked about Thomas Edison and his early experiments with motion pictures. That was back in

episode 118. In the United States, we usually think of Edison as the quote-unquote inventor of

motion pictures, although that's not quite true. Although he was one of the early pioneers of the

medium. He did not invent the idea of the early pioneers of the medium.

He did not invent the idea of taking a series of photographs of a subject in movement and then displaying them rapidly, but he did put a lot of effort into making it practical.

Edison conceived his moving picture machine as comparable to his phonograph, by which I mean

the moving pictures would be shown in a machine you looked at through a pair of eye holes one

person at a time. These were moving pictures all right, but they were not motion pictures or

movies, as we know them today.

Edison also chose not to patent his invention, the kinetoscope in Europe, which freed Europeans to copy and improve on the design. Enter the aptly named Lumiere brothers. I say aptly named

because Lumier means light in French. See also the little

candelabra guy in Beauty and the Beast. The Lumier brothers, August and Louis, who in 1895 developed

the Cinematograph, a relatively small hand-cranked machine that could both film a motion picture at 16

frames per second and then project it onto a screen. Unlike Edison's bulky equipment, the

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