obably never to be published, but which
show what a real inventor can do when he cuts loose to create a new
heaven and a new earth, unrestrained by any formal respect for existing
conditions of servitude to three dimensions and the standard elements.

The present chapter, essentially technical in its subject-matter, is
perhaps as significant as any in this biography, because it presents
Edison as the Master Impresario of his age, and maybe of many following
ages also. His phonographs and his motion pictures have more audiences
in a week than all the theatres in America in a year. The "Nickelodeon"
is the central fact in modern amusement, and Edison founded it. All that
millions know of music and drama he furnishes; and the whole study of
the theatrical managers thus reaching the masses is not to ascertain the
limitations of the new art, but to discover its boundless possibilities.
None of the exuberant versions of things Edison has not done could
endure for a moment with the simple narrative of what he has really done
as the world's new Purveyor of Pleasure. And yet it all depends on
the toilful conquest of a subtle and intricate art. The story of the
invention of the phonograph has been told. That of the evolution of
motion pictures follows. It is all one piece of sober, careful analysis,
and stubborn, successful attack on the problem.

The possibility of making a record of animate movement, and subsequently
reproducing it, was predicted long before the actual accomplishment.
This, as we have seen, was also the case with the phonograph, the
telephone, and the electric light. As to the phonograph, the prediction
went only so far as the RESULT; the apparent intricacy of the problem
being so great that the MEANS for accomplishing the desired end
were seemingly beyond the grasp of the imagination or the mastery of
invention.

With the electric light and the telephone the prediction included not
only the result to be accomplished, but, in a rough and general way,
the mechanism itself; that is to say, long before a single sound was
intelligibly transmitted it was recognized that such a thing might be
done by causing a diaphragm, vibrated by original sounds, to communicate
its movements to a distant diaphragm by a suitably controlled electric
current. In the case of the electric light, the heating of a conductor
to incandescence in a highly rarefied atmosphere was suggested as a
scheme of illumination long before its actual