1Many believe that the story first began in America in 1877,
2when two friends were arguing over whether a horse ever had all four feet or hooves off the ground when it galloped.
3To settle the bet, a photographer was asked to photograph a horse galloping
4and the bet was settled because you could see that all the hooves were off the ground in some of the photos.
5What was even more interesting was that if the photos were shown in quick succession
6the horse looked like it was running -
7in other words 'moving pictures'.
8The person who became interested in taking the moving pictures to its next step
9was the famous American inventor Thomas Edison.
10Actually, he didn't do the work himself but rather asked a young Scotsman in his employ to design a system,
11which he did.
12Now this young fellow was clever
13because the first thing he did was study other systems -
14primitive as they were of moving pictures
15and then put all the existing technologies together to make the first entire motion picture system.
16He designed a camera, a projection device and the film.
17The system was first shown in New York in 1894 and was really very popular.
18Apparently, people lined up around the block to see the wonderful new invention.
19There were, however, a couple of problems with the system.
20The camera weighed over 200 kilograms
21and only one person at a time could see the film.
22Well now, news of the new system in America travelled fast
23and a number of rival European systems started to appear once people had heard about it.
24The single problem with all the systems was they couldn't really project the film onto a screen -
25you know, so more than one person could see it.
26Then in 1895;
27three systems were all developed,
28more or less at the same time and independently of each other.
29I guess the most famous of these was by the Lumiere Brothers from France,
30and they called their system the cinematographe
31which of course is where the word cinema comes from.
32There were also two brothers in Germany who developed a successful system and they called it a bioskop.
33Well now, once the problem of projection had been solved,
34the next challenge for the inventors was to make the films longer and more interesting.
35A continuing problem at the time was that the films had a tendency to break when they were being played -
36a problem which was caused by the tension between the two wheels,
37or 'reels' as they are called, which hold the film.
38Now this problem was solved by two American brothers.
39They developed the 'Lantham Loop',
40which was the simple addition of a third reel between the two main reels,
41and this took all the tension away with the result that the film stopped snapping.
42So now there was a real possibility of having films of more than two or three minutes,
43and this led to the making of The Great Train Robbery - the very first movie made.
44It only lasted 11 minutes but was an absolute sensation,
45and there were cases of people watching the movie and actually fainting when the character fired a gun at the camera!
46Almost overnight movies became a craze,
47and by 1905, people in America were lining up to see movies in 'store theatres', as they were called then.
48I guess the next big step in terms of development of technology
49was to have people actually talking on the film,
50and the first step towards this was in 1926
51when sound effects were first used on a film.
52It wasn't until the following year however that the first 'talkie', as they were called then, was made.
53This film featured actors speaking only during parts of the film
54and was called The Jazz Singer,
55and it wasn't until 1928 that the first all-talking film was produced,
56and this was called The Lights of New York.
57Unfortunately, the sound on this early film was not very good
58and I believe they put subtitles on the film -
59that is, they printed the dialogue along the bottom of the film
60to compensate for this poor sound quality.
61Now, with the addition of sound,
62moving pictures became far more difficult...