From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios, and I'm the vintage fairy godmother.

Um, I'm not like a regular fairy godmother, turning pumpkins into carriages and all that jazz.

My job is to cast spells that remind people what life was like in the olden days.

Like, pretend there were no planes, or blenders.

Just imagine trying to make a smoothie without a blender.

Would you mash up the fruit by hand or maybe...

Squish it with a rock?

Oh, it makes me rather happy to flick my wrist and see these gadgets and gizmos go,

poof! Sometimes we've had amazing inventions for so long

that we forget how they first came to be, which is why I was particularly tickled by Roman's question.

Hi, my name is Roman. I live in Duncanon, Pennsylvania. My question is, when were movies first made?

I had a chat with a film historian about this question the other day after I'd poofed away her projector.

And she conjured up the most delightful answer.

Movies were first made at the end of the 19th century.

We have to imagine this is a moment when there are no cars.

People travel by train or a horse-drawn carriage or they walk.

If you wanted to share a photo of yourself, you had to go to a

photographic studio and have your portrait made. And those portraits were really precious.

My name is Laura Surna. I'm an historian and I work mostly on film and film culture. So at the end of the 19th century, there were a lot of

people who were really interested in using photography to study movement. Sometimes they're

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