Stories of Inventors - The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers by Russell Doubleday
page 84 of 140 (60%)
page 84 of 140 (60%)
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their flesh crept when they saw it--a team of plunging horses coming
straight toward them at frightful speed. The driver's face could be seen between the horses' heads, distorted with effort and fear. Straight on the horses came, their nostrils distended, their great muscles straining, their fore hoofs striking out almost, it seemed, in the faces of the people in the front row of seats. People shrank back, some women shrieked, and when the plunging horses seemed almost on them, at the very climax of excitement, the screen was darkened and the picture blotted out. The camera taking the pictures had continued to work to the very instant it was struck and hurled to destruction. In addition to the stereopticon and its attendant mechanism, which is only suitable when the pictures are to be shown to an audience, a machine has been invented for the use of an individual or a small group of people. In the mutoscope the positives or prints are made on long strips of heavy bromide paper, instead of films, and are generally enlarged; the strip is cut up after development and mounted on a cylinder, so they radiate like the spokes of a wheel, and are set in the same consecutive order in which they were taken. The thousands of cards bearing the pictures at the outer ends are placed in a box, so that when the wheel of pictures is turned, by means of a crank attached to the axle, a projection holds each card in turn before the lens through which the observer looks. The projection in the top of the box acts like the thumb turning the pages of a book. Each of the pictures is presented in such rapid succession that the object appears to move, just as the scenes thrown on the screen by a lantern show action. The mutoscope widens the use of motion-photography infinitely. The United States Government will use it to illustrate the workings of many of its departments at the World's Fair at St. Louis: the life aboard |
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