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was coined in 1891, but wasn’t used much at first. The earliest movies were called life portrayals or mechanically reproduced theatre entertainment, though by the end of 1896 people were calling them moving pictures and by the early 1900s had shortened this almost everywhere to movies (though until as late as the 1920s people sometimes referred to them as movie plays ) . People who took the pictures were called camerists. Cameraman didn’t occur to anyone until 1905.
    The first real movie – that is, one with a story-line – was The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter, who had begun in the Edison studios in Paterson, New Jersey, as a general handyman and camerist before rising to become head of production. Running eleven minutes and containing fourteen scenes, The Great Train Robbery was not only revolutionary in its sophisticated editing and pacing, but also in its content. It was both the first true movie and the first western – though that word wouldn’t become general until about 1928; before that they were cowboy movies or gun operas – and the first to explore the exciting possibilities of violent crime. 7 It was a sensation. The excitement it generated and its sense of wondrous novelty are difficult to conceive now. When one of the characters fired a gun at the camera, many members of the audience gasped and recoiled. (This may not seem quite so ridiculous if you pause to consider your own response thefirst time you saw a 3-D movie.) A few even fainted. It became one of those things that simply everybody had to see.
    Almost overnight movies went from being a craze to a compulsion. By 1905 people everywhere were flocking to store theatres (so called because they were usually set up in vacant stores) or nickelodeons, where viewers were treated to half an hour of escapism for a nickel. Nickelodeon had been used as a word for peep-show arcades since 1888, though the first purpose-built cinema, in Pittsburgh, styled itself not a nickelodeon, but a Nicolet. Within two weeks of the Nicolet’s opening, people were flocking to the theatre from eight in the morning until midnight to see Edwin S. Porter’s sensational Great Train Robbery, and the proprietors were clearing profits of $1,000 a week.
    By 1906 there were a thousand nickelodeons all over America; by 1907 five thousand. Film was designed to run at a speed of sixteen frames per second, but nickelodeon operators quickly discovered that if they speeded things up a little they could get in more shows. For millions, attending the nickelodeon became a kind of addiction. By 1908 New York City’s movie theatres – the word had been coined the year before; in 1914 it would be joined by movie houses – were clocking up 200,000 admissions every day, including Sundays when they were required by law to be closed. Many non-movie-goers considered the phenomenon alarming if not distasteful. This was partly because of the mildly risqué nature of some of the shows – within two weeks of Edison launching the first kinetophone parlour in 1894 some enterprising opportunist was offering a peep-show called Doloria in the Passion Dance, which was not terribly titillating by modern standards but was certainly a step up on Fred Ott’s Sneeze – and partly because the movies attracted a disproportionate number of lower-class immigrants (for whom language problems often made other, more verbal forms of entertainment impractical), and anything that gave pleasureto lower-class immigrants was almost by definition suspect. But it was also because of something less specific – a vague sense that going to the pictures was somehow immoral and conducive to idleness – and authorities often had sudden, unprompted purges on the early movie houses, as in 1908 when New York Mayor George B. McLellan arbitrarily ordered shut all 550 of that city’s establishments for no real reason other than that he didn’t like them. 8
    The word movies even began to take on a slightly unsavoury tone.