Inventor

Last week in Manhattan, they laid the cornerstone of a new cinema-film exchange, a place where the commercial envoys of millions of people will go to buy or rent for them the latest articles in synthetic culture. At such ceremonies, important people gather--"producers" worth scads of money, "artists" whose faces are fabulous fortunes when properly painted, "directors" who have popular psychology minced up and pigeonholed to the last sentimental convulsion over a glycerine tear, "publicity directors" who have utterly exhausted all superlatives in describing the achievements of the rest.

Such folks attended last week's ceremony, and at the skirts of the crowd they formed stood a frail little man whom only a news reporter or two recognized and addressed as Jean LeRoy.

Mr. LeRoy watched the goings on, and when they were over returned to his little workshop uptown with the comfortable feeling that, even if the notables had not paid much attention to him, he was directly, almost solely, responsibile for their party. He had asked them beforehand if they would like to place something truly historic in that cornerstone and when they said "yes," had given them the first four strips of film that any man ever ran through a motion picture projector.

The coronation scene of Edward VII, a fire scene, a storm scene and Washing the Baby--those were the four strips that an Englishman named Martin had brought LeRoy a quarter of a century ago. Inventor LeRoy had got to thinking about

"motion" pictures one day when looking out at a Manhattan crowd through a ground glass in the back of a camera. Then Martin had told him about having taken pictures in rapid sequence, and Inventor LeRoy had worked out a machine for projecting them. On his 40th birthday, in 1894, LeRoy made his first demonstration, then toured the U. S.

"I stopped," says he, "in towns of all sizes, and I found it necessary to invite the mayor, the sheriff, the chief of police or the constable of the town to inspect the exhibition, to prove to them that the pictures really moved."

But Inventor LeRoy neglected to patent his machine. Others copied, patented, reaped. When William Fox opened a moving picture emporium in 14th Street, the scheme was still so much of a novelty that Inventor LeRoy asked: "Do you think this will be a success?"

Said Fox: "Watch my smoke."

Last week after the cornerstone ceremony (it was William Fox's cornerstone), said Inventor LeRoy, now 71 and a machinist of limited means: "I've been watching his smoke ever since."