Many Living Picture Devices

            There appears to be no end to the varieties of projecting apparatus that are being placed on the market. Here is a list of a few which are already being exhibited at the various music halls and places of public entertainment: The motorgraph, the animatoscope, the theatrograph, the kinematograph, the projectoscope, the cinemetoscope, the vitascope, the cinematograph, the veriscope, the animatograph, the viveoscope, the eidoloscope, the cinagraphoscope, the biograph, the rayoscope, the magniscope.

 [Article taken from the Eastern Courier (Hertford, NC) 16 Sept 1897]

The eidoloscope, was first demonstrated in April 1895. It was built by the Latham family. In May 1895, the Lambda Company filmed a prizefight on the roof of Madison Square Garden in New York. Consisting of four rounds lasting one minute each and punctuated by 30-second breaks, the event lasted for about eight minutes. The Lathams recorded the fight in its entirety—rounds plus rest breaks—and projected the film for eight nonstop minutes. They’d solved the problem of tension on the filmstrip.[1] It incorporated a simple solution to the film breakage problem in the form of a loop in the film before it passed in front of the lens. The jerking of the intermittent mechanism thus pulled only on this inches-long loop, not on the whole reel. This innovation would become an integral part of the modern movie camera. It is called the “Latham Loop” but was actually invented by Eidoloscope Company employee Eugene Lauste, working for a salary of $21 a week.[2]

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[1] FROM THE MAGIC LANTERN TO THE PROJECTED MOTION PICTURE: http://cinemathequefroncaise.com/Chapter1-2/CHAPTER_01_PART_02.html#F1.28

[2] THE FIGHT THAT STARTED THE MOVIES: The World Heavyweight Championship, the Birth of Cinema and the First Feature Film by SAMUEL HAWLEY (Nov. 5, 2016): http://www.samuelhawley.com/The-Fight-That-Started-the-Movies.html