During the sixty years which followed the invention of photography, engineers, chemists and optic scientists gradually solved the problems of the photographic reproduction of movement. The final step, taken around 1894, was the adoption of the projector which allowed the human brain to reconstruct from a series of photographs the movement itself. It was incidental to the purpose of the men who struggled with the task of photographing movement that projection also allowed a large number of people to view the picture simultaneously. But it was this element which turned a scientific invention into a major entertainment industry and, in a few years, also turned it into a medium of mass communications. ‘Film’ was an invention of considerable scientific utility; the ‘cinema’ was the new entertainment industry and medium, which resulted from the fortuitous fact that it was the entrepreneurs of the fairground and vaudeville business who were the first to take up film as a commercial proposition. It was a match which lasted and which determined the development of the cinema as fundamentally as the decision to make radio into a public utility came to determine the evolution of broadcasting.

The cinema grew upon the old business of entertainment by optical illusions. Its roots were in that fascination for optical and mechanical ‘ingenuities’ which had kept ringing the tills of the great nineteenth-century fairgrounds and amusement piers in Britain and the ‘English Gardens’ of the continent, and on a higher social plane paid handsome fees to a peripatetic order of magic lantern lecturers. ‘It won't draw the public for more than a month.