| Many believe that the story first began in America in 1877, |
| when two friends were arguing over whether a horse ever had all four feet or hooves off the ground when it galloped. |
| To settle the bet, a photographer was asked to photograph a horse galloping |
| and the bet was settled because you could see that all the hooves were off the ground in some of the photos. |
| What was even more interesting was that if the photos were shown in quick succession |
| the horse looked like it was running - |
| in other words 'moving pictures'. |
| The person who became interested in taking the moving pictures to its next step |
| was the famous American inventor Thomas Edison. |
| Actually, he didn't do the work himself but rather asked a young Scotsman in his employ to design a system, |
| which he did. |
| Now this young fellow was clever |
| because the first thing he did was study other systems - |
| primitive as they were of moving pictures |
| and then put all the existing technologies together to make the first entire motion picture system. |
| He designed a camera, a projection device and the film. |
| The system was first shown in New York in 1894 and was really very popular. |
| Apparently, people lined up around the block to see the wonderful new invention. |
| There were, however, a couple of problems with the system. |
| The camera weighed over 200 kilograms |
| and only one person at a time could see the film. |
| Well now, news of the new system in America travelled fast |
| and a number of rival European systems started to appear once people had heard about it. |
| The single problem with all the systems was they couldn't really project the film onto a screen - |
| you know, so more than one person could see it. |
| Then in 1895; |
| three systems were all developed, |
| more or less at the same time and independently of each other. |
| I guess the most famous of these was by the Lumiere Brothers from France, |
| and they called their system the cinematographe |
| which of course is where the word cinema comes from. |
| There were also two brothers in Germany who developed a successful system and they called it a bioskop. |
| Well now, once the problem of projection had been solved, |
| the next challenge for the inventors was to make the films longer and more interesting. |
| A continuing problem at the time was that the films had a tendency to break when they were being played - |
| a problem which was caused by the tension between the two wheels, |
| or 'reels' as they are called, which hold the film. |
| Now this problem was solved by two American brothers. |
| They developed the 'Lantham Loop', |
| which was the simple addition of a third reel between the two main reels, |
| and this took all the tension away with the result that the film stopped snapping. |
| So now there was a real possibility of having films of more than two or three minutes, |
| and this led to the making of The Great Train Robbery - the very first movie made. |
| It only lasted 11 minutes but was an absolute sensation, |
| and there were cases of people watching the movie and actually fainting when the character fired a gun at the camera! |
| Almost overnight movies became a craze, |
| and by 1905, people in America were lining up to see movies in 'store theatres', as they were called then. |
| I guess the next big step in terms of development of technology |
| was to have people actually talking on the film, |
| and the first step towards this was in 1926 |
| when sound effects were first used on a film. |
| It wasn't until the following year however that the first 'talkie', as they were called then, was made. |
| This film featured actors speaking only during parts of the film |
| and was called The Jazz Singer, |
| and it wasn't until 1928 that the first all-talking film was produced, |
| and this was called The Lights of New York. |
| Unfortunately, the sound on this early film was not very good |
| and I believe they put subtitles on the film - |
| that is, they printed the dialogue along the bottom of the film |
| to compensate for this poor sound quality. |
| Now, with the addition of sound, |
| moving pictures became far more difficult... |