the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are
brought together to enact pantomimes which will concentrate within the
space of a few minutes the most entertaining and instructive incidents
of history and the leading happenings of the world.

At all great events, no matter where transpiring, the different moving
picture companies have trained men at the front ready with their cameras
to "catch" every incident, every movement even to the wink of an
eyelash, so that the "stay-at-homes" can see the _show_ as well, and
with a great deal more comfort than if they had traveled hundreds,
or even thousands, of miles to be present in _propria persona_.

How did moving pictures originate? What and when were the beginning?
It is popularly believed that animated pictures had their inception
with Edison who projected the biograph in 1887, having based it on
that wonderful and ingenious toy, the Zoetrope. Long before 1887,
however, several men of inventive faculties had turned their attention
to a means of giving apparent animation to pictures. The first that
met with any degree of success was Edward Muybridge, a photographer
of San Francisco. This was in 1878. A revolution had been brought about
in photography by the introduction of the instantaneous process. By
the use of sensitive films of gelatine bromide of silver emulsion the
time required for the action of ordinary daylight in producing a
photograph had been reduced to a very small fraction of a second.
Muybridge utilized these films for the photographic analysis of animal
motion. Beside a race-track he placed a battery of cameras, each camera
being provided with a spring shutter which was controlled by a thread
stretched across the track. A running horse broke each thread the
moment he passed in front of the camera and thus twenty or thirty
pictures of him were taken in close succession within one or two seconds