s a large part in the diffusion of intelligence, and the
last half century in the United States has seen a great development in
photography and photoengraving. The earliest experiments in photography
belong almost exclusively to Europe. Morse, as we have seen, introduced
the secret to America and interested his friend John W. Draper, who had
a part in the perfection of the dry plate and who was one of the first,
if not the first, to take a portrait by photography.

The world's greatest inventor in photography is, however, George
Eastman, of Rochester. It was in 1888 that Eastman introduced a new
camera, which he called by the distinctive name Kodak, and with it the
slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest." This first kodak
was loaded with a roll of sensitized paper long enough for a hundred
exposures. Sent to the makers, the roll could itself be developed
and pictures could be printed from it. Eastman had been an amateur
photographer when the fancy was both expensive and tedious. Inventing a
method of making dry plates, he began to manufacture them in a small way
as early as 1880. After the first kodak, there came others filled with
rolls of sensitized nitro-cellulose film. Priority in the invention
of the cellulose film, instead of glass, which has revolutionized
photography, has been decided by the courts to belong to the Reverend
Hannibal Goodwin, but the honor none the less belongs to Eastman,
who independently worked out his process and gave photography to the
millions. The introduction by the Eastman Kodak Company of a film
cartridge which could be inserted or removed without retiring to a dark
room removed the chief difficulty in the way of amateurs, and a camera
of some sort, varying in price from a dollar or two to as many hundreds,
is today an indispensable part of a vacation equipment.

In the development of the animated pictures Thomas Alva Edison has
played a large part. Many were the efforts to give the appearance of
movement to pictures before the first real entertainment was staged by
Henry Heyl of Philadelphia. Heyl's pictures were on glass plates fixed
in the circumference of a wheel, and each was brought and held for a
part of a second before the lens. This method was obviously too slow and
too expensive. Edison with his keen mind approached the difficulty and
after a prolonged series of experiments arrived at the decision that
a continuous tape-like film would be necessary. He invented the firs