All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

344 All About Inventions buildings, each face of which is different from the other. On this side the Orient is portrayed, while the reverse aspect gives the Occident. In addition to these buildings, shells are run up at a moment’s notice, producing the facsimile of a building or street characteristic of any city or town in the world. A street of London, Paris, Bombay, or far-away Nome will be run up to-night, the scenes for which it is required will be filmed to-morrow, and the street will vanish the next night. Here a thrilling incident in a jungle story is being enacted with the indigenous wild animals, under the supervision of trainers, on the prowl. A stone’s throw away a vigorous episode characteristic of the wild and woolly West is being played, while a Biblical battle is being waged on the adjacent hillside. On the big stage, the largest in the world, with a superfices of 80,000 square feet, fifteen plays can be in progress at one and the same time, from a trick picture to a domestic comedy in a suburban dining-room, from a sensational escape over a telegraph wire to the burglary of a million- aire’s mansion, from a scene in the basement where the plumber is having a spirited tussle with a burst water-main to a dashing escape over a roof. The scenes are set side by side, and each camera, able to take in only what is within range of its narrow eye, is whirring merrily the livelong day. Some idea of the pressure at which the work is conducted may be gathered from the fact that at Universal City 1,500 subjects are filmed during the course of the year, from the short story, compressed maybe within 800 feet of film, to the serial story of twenty parts, repre- senting in the aggregate from 30,000 to 50,000 feet.