From the History of Moving Pictures

Many believe that the story first began in America in 1877, when two friends were (22) ______ over whether a horse ever had all four feet or hooves off the ground when it galloped.

To settle the bet, a photographer was asked to photograph a horse galloping and the bet was settled because you could see that all the hooves were (23) ______ the ground in some of the photos.

What was even more interesting was that if the photos were shown in quick succession the horse looked (24) ______ it was running — in other words ‘moving pictures’.

The person who became interested in (25) ______ the moving pictures to its next step was the famous American inventor Thomas Edison.

Actually, he didn’t do the work (26) ______ but rather asked a young Scotsman in his employ to design a system, which he did. Now this young fellow was clever because the first thing he did was study other systemsprimitive as they were — of moving pictures and then put all the existing technologies together to make the first entire motion picture system. 

He (27) ______ a camera, a projection device and the film. The system was first shown in New York in 1894 and was really very popular.

Apparently people (28) ______ around the block to see the wonderful new invention. There were, however, a couple of problems with the system. The camera weighed over 200 kilograms and only one person at a time could see the film. 

Well now, news of the new system in America (29) ______ fast and a number of rival European systems started to appear once people had heard about it.

The single problem with all the systems was that they couldn’t really (30) ______ the film onto a screen — you know, so more than one person could see it. Then in 1895, three systems were developed, more or less at the same time and independently of each other. 

 I guess the most famous of these was (31) ______ the Lumiere Brothers from France, and they called their system the cinematograph which of course is where the word cinema comes from. 

Well now, once the problem of projection had been solved, the next (32) ______ for the inventors was to make the films longer and more interesting.

A continuing problem at the time was that the films had a (33) ______ to break when they were being played — a problem which was caused by the tension between the two wheels, or ‘reels’ as they are called, which hold the film.