A Community of Engineers

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-41
Author(s):  
Luci Marzola

In the motion picture industry, large East Coast manufacturers such as Kodak, GE, DuPont, and Bausch & Lomb produced materials such as lights, film stock, and lenses for production. Beginning with a brief history of the motion picture technology field before 1915, this chapter describes how the industry increasingly became reliant on these American industrial concerns. Beginning around 1916, the manufacturing side of the business was professionalized and unified by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), while continuing to isolate itself from the production side of the industry for another decade. SMPE emphasized standardization across companies in the manufacturing of motion picture tools, creating a stable industry and a community for knowledge sharing that had little contact with the production center in the west.

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Walter

The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ set out by Sheller and Urry (2006) and others urges social scientists to centre many interlocking mobilities in their analyses of contemporary social change, challenging taken-for-granted sedentarism. Drawing on the example of Irish women's chain migration from small farms in the West of Ireland to the East coast of the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper explores a longer history of high levels of mobility. Whilst migration lay at the heart of the movement, it encompassed a much wider range of movements of people, information and material goods. The ‘moorings’ of women in the their workplace-homes on rural farms and in urban domestic service constituted a gendered immobility, but migration also opened up new opportunities for intra-urban moves, circulatory Transatlantic journeys and upward social mobility. The materiality of such ‘old’ mobility provides an early baseline against which to assess the huge scale of rapidly-changing hyper-mobility and instantaneous communication in the twenty-first century.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (2B) ◽  
pp. 517-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Gallagher ◽  
E J McGee ◽  
P I Mitchell

Data on radiocarbon (14C), 137Cs, 210Pb, and 241Am levels in an ombrotrophic peat sequence from a montane site on the east coast of Ireland are compared with data from a similar sequence at an Atlantic peatland site on the west coast. The 14C profiles from the west and east coasts show a broadly similar pattern. Levels increase from 100 pMC or less in the deepest horizons examined, to peak values at the west and east coast sites of 117 ± 0.6 pMC and 132 ± 0.7 pMC, respectively (corresponding to maximal fallout from nuclear weapons testing around 1964), thereafter diminishing to levels of 110–113 pMC near the surface. Significantly, peak levels at the east coast site are considerably higher than corresponding levels at the west coast site, though both are lower than reported peak values for continental regions. The possibility of significant 14C enrichment at the east coast site due to past discharges from nuclear installations in the UK seems unlikely. The 210Pbex inventory at the east coast site (6500 Bq m−2) is significantly higher than at the west coast (5300 Bq m−2) and is consistent with the difference in rainfall at the two sites. Finally, 137Cs and 241Am inventories at the east coast site also exceed those at the west coast site by similar proportions (east:west ratio of approximately 1:1.2).


1930 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-4

The early business career of motion pictures lies entangled in the correspondence and documents of the firm of Raff & Gammon which have been presented to our organization through the kindness of Terry Ramsaye, Editor-in-Chief of Pathé Exchange, Inc., New York. Lost in the volumes of vituperative letters from impatient dealers and the business negotiations of Raff & Gammon for the sale of monopoly rights for whole states, the business history of the industry awaits a thorough ransacking of the available documents. What is most apparent immediately is the excitement of the public in the new invention and the rush of the more adroit to seize the profits from its immediate exploitation.


1976 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 125-159
Author(s):  
Edward Guiliano ◽  
Richard C. Keenan

D. W. Griffith, the most revered and influential movie creator of his day, is now universally acknowledged as the most significant figure in the history of American film. A one-time stage actor and playwright, and before that a Kentucky farmboy and high school dropout, David Wark Griffith became a movie director in 1908. By 1915, the year he released his monumental film The Birth of a Nation, he had completely revolutionized the motion picture industry. Appropriately, it was this innovative pioneer of the cinema who first brought the work of Robert Browning to the screen. In 1909 Griffith made a version of Pippa Passes and, apparently encouraged by the favorable response it received, made a version of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1912.


2021 ◽  
pp. 219-220
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Erish

The Conclusion summarizes of a fundamental key to Vitagraph's success. Smith and Blackton's decision to embrace the vaudeville aesthetic of providing a variety of family-friendly entertainment proved so profitable that it laid the foundation upon which the rest of the American motion picture industry was to follow for well over half a century. It is posited that Vitagraph produced a greater variety of subjects than most other companies because of the inherent differences of its founding partners, Blackton being a humanist and Smith a Christian. It is an approach that American producers have chosen not follow for several decades as motion picture attendance declines. Not only does a comprehensive history of Vitagraph correct fundamental inaccuracies to the canon, it can also serve as a blueprint for a more inclusive and profitable future.


2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-268
Author(s):  
R. J. CLEEVELY

A note dealing with the history of the Hawkins Papers, including the material relating to John Hawkins (1761–1841) presented to the West Sussex Record Office in the 1960s, recently transferred to the Cornwall County Record Office, Truro, in order to be consolidated with the major part of the Hawkins archive held there. Reference lists to the correspondence of Sibthorp-Hawkins, Hawkins-Sibthorp, and Hawkins to his mother mentioned in The Flora Graeca story (Lack, 1999) are provided.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-358
Author(s):  
WEN-CHIN OUYANG

I begin my exploration of ‘Ali Mubarak (1823/4–1893) and the discourses on modernization ‘performed’ in his only attempt at fiction, ‘Alam al-Din (The Sign of Religion, 1882), with a quote from Guy Davenport because it elegantly sums up a key theoretical principle underpinning any discussion of cultural transformation and, more particularly, of modernization. Locating ‘Ali Mubarak and his only fictional work at the juncture of the transformation from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ in the recent history of Arab culture and of Arabic narrative, I find Davenport's pronouncement tantalizingly appropriate. He not only places the stakes of history and geography in one another, but simultaneously opens up the imagination to the combined forces of time and space that stand behind these two distinct yet related disciplines.


2015 ◽  
pp. 91 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. D. Mats ◽  
I. M. Yefimova ◽  
A. A. Kulchitskii

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