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Lot #190
Louis Lumiere

“One should not hope to convince movie house owners to change projectors for an insignificant improvement which certainly would not have an impact on their receipts!”

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Description

“One should not hope to convince movie house owners to change projectors for an insignificant improvement which certainly would not have an impact on their receipts!”

Inventor of photographic equipment, along with his brother, Auguste. In 1893 they developed, the cinematographe, and showed the first motion pictures using film projection in 1895. They also invented the Autochrome screen plate for color photography in 1903. ALS in French, three pages on two adjoining sheets, 5.25 x 7, black-bordered stationery, August 5, 1926. Letter to an unidentified friend, in full (translated): “The proposed process is not new; it was patented in a barely different format a long time ago. It seems to me of little interest because scintillation, which is null in the black areas of the subject, increases with lighting. Adjusting the luminosity and doubling the number of pulses on the retina through complete shut off using the opaque sector of the shutter in the middle of the time when the film is still, said scintillation is imperceptible. And one must note that, in current machines, the period of stillness is not 50% as the author says but from 66 to 75%, which allows this sacrifice. Finally, it seems to me that the proposed mechanism has very big inertia for intermittent movement and the author appears to have no idea of how difficult it would be to achieve continuous lighting when the light beam goes from the lower path to the higher one. And then, one should not hope to convince movie house owners to change projectors for an insignificant improvement which certainly would not have an impact on their receipts! Here is, my dear friend, my opinion of the question.” A couple small separations along central horizontal and vertical folds, vertical fold through a single letter of signature, and some mild wrinkling, otherwise fine condition. RR Auction COA.

Auction Info

  • Auction Title: Rare Manuscript, Document & Autograph
  • Dates: #430 - Ended June 18, 2014