Mount Terminus Read Free Page A

aperture. The instant Jacob looked at it, he saw the wondrous flaw, and in the instant that followed, its remedy occurred to him as if it were handed down from heaven by the angels of God the Aztec priests witnessed in Dee’s obsidian stone.
    He spent the next year constituting Edison’s Kinetoscope, reengineering its system of feeds and loops, sprockets and pulleys, and when it was completed, he added to it a singular item, deceptively simple: a timing mechanism—not unlike what one might find inside a common pocket watch—that would make it possible to deliver however many frames of film per second one desired to the viewing piece of any motion picture device. In keeping with his character, the evening after he observed the successful operation of Jacob’s invention, Jonah Liebeskind—as if he had recognized at that moment that he was on the cusp of declining into the middling state of mediocrity he so abhorred—died peacefully in his sleep, leaving not the slightest indication on his face that he’d struggled to stay alive.
    To Jacob, who had proved himself over the years a devoted acolyte, Mr. Liebeskind willed his splendid home, his machine shop, his tools, his collection of optical devices, and the type of small fortune a fastidious bachelor accumulates after so many years of hard work without holidays. And once again, Jacob found himself alone, without friends or companions, better off only in riches.
    With a small portion of the money left to him by his mentor, Jacob bought a suit more refined than the suit he wore to shul on the high holidays, and, dressed in this new ensemble, he traveled to West Orange to see Edison, who, after studying the patent for Jacob’s timing mechanism, had agreed to sit for a demonstration. When presenting his invention to the great man, Jacob said, See, sir, see how simple and elegant. And he showed how simply and elegantly his invention rotated the device’s shutter as it intermittently halted and reengaged the scrolling film, how it left just the right length of slack for the sprockets of Edison’s Kinetoscope to move the frames of celluloid past the aperture, to create for the eye fluid imagery. And at this sight, Edison remarked, Now, why hadn’t I thought of that?
    Jacob sold Edison the rights to use what he would come to call the Rosenbloom Drive for a modest royalty, and he reserved the privilege of being the sole manufacturer and distributor of the mechanism. Jacob’s modest riches wouldn’t yet accrue into a fortune, but they would soon thereafter, when, several years later, a former associate of Mr. Edison’s, a Mr. W.K.L. Dickson, who had been impressed by the young Rosenbloom’s ingenuity, sought Jacob out in his deceased mentor’s machine shop, and presented to him a new challenge: to build a mechanical system that would allow a projection device to cast a life-size image of a continuous action of prolonged duration. At present, because of the fussy internal configuration and limited capacity of Edison’s Kinetoscope, only the shortest of moving pictures could be observed—of the most minuscule physical gestures, of the most meager displays of human nature—and they could only be seen by stooping over a box and squinting into a hole. Mr. Dickson placed in Jacob’s hands a design for an apparatus he called a Phantoscope, and Jacob, again, after a short period of study, saw—as if God had breathed the solution into his mind—what Mr. Dickson and his colleagues could not. He set forth his terms—a greater royalty than the one he asked of Edison and the right to be the sole manufacturer of whatever moving parts he invented—and Mr. Dickson agreed.
    In a few months’ time, Jacob built for him a mechanism more complex, but equally as elegant as the one he had built for Edison: a labyrinth of rolling roundabouts and reversals, metallic passages, clips and levers, all of which fed