THE KINETOGRAPH.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 1814, 22 July 1891, Page 5

THE KINETOGRAPH.

Edison's "latest and most wonderful invention " is thus described by the San Francisco 'Chronicle: —"F rom the laboratory of the Wizard of Menlo Park there is coming an invention which out-Edisons Edison. It is a marriage of the phonograph with the camera. The new wonder will be called the ' kinetograph.' Mr Edison has been at work on this newest conception of his genius for three years. Now he knows that its basic principle is right. All that remains to be done is to perfect the details. The new invention is a combination machine in which the phonograph and a phonographic camera work together. It will reproduce not only sound, but also a picture of what passes before it. Mr Edieon claims that it will reproduce an opera, and will reproduce the performers so that their presence on the stage will be depicted. Every muscle of their faces will be seen to work, and their movements will all be true to nature. To produce this result it was necessary for the inventor to be able to take a series of instantaneous photographs following each other in such quick succession that no lapse of time can be detected between the impressions recorded, the series of pictures thus becoming, in effect, but one continuous picture, and this Mr Edison has succeeded in doing. Operated by an electric motor, his camera will take fortysix impressions in each second, and in this way impressions are recorded so rapidly that the motions became resolved into pure motion instead of a series of jerks. The impressions are recorded on a long roll of gelatine paper fastened to a spindle, which passes over a photographic lens. This is how Mr Edison himself describes the wonder :—: — ' The machine start?, moves, uncloses, stops, takes a photograph, closes, starts, uncloses, stops, takes another, and co on, and forty-six of these are recorded every second.' This|process can be kept up for thirty minutes without a pause, so that 2,700 photographs can be taken each minute, and 82,800 every half hour. Afterwards the photographic slips will be developed, replaced in the machine, and a projecting lens will be substituted for the photographic lens. Then the reproducing part of the phonograph will be adjusted, and by means of a calcium light the whole effect can be reproduced at life size on a white curtain in front of the audience. The original scene will appear to their eyes as true as life. They will see the singers before them, and all their movements and gestures will appear as if they were actually on the stage. Colors will not appear, but otherwise you will see and bear the opera as you see it at theatres. The machine is, in fact, a mechanical eye."

"Why didn't you marry your husband fifteen years ago ? He would have taken you then," saidan Austin lady to a newly -married friend. "I know ; but fifteen years ago he was too old to suit me." A little boy dropped some eggs while carrying them borne, His mother asked : "Did you break any of them?" "No," said the little fellow, "but some of the shells came off. '