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    The motion picture is one of two major arts to have evolved within modern history—the other art being still photography, upon which the motion picture is based. (Television is here regarded simply as a means for distribution and exhibition of moving images accompanied by sound.) We can only guess what first prompted people to express themselves in the various older artistic media, or how early modes and conventions developed and disappeared as 

aesthetic and social functions changed. The motion picture, however, is clearly the child of nineteenth-century scientific curiosity and technological ingenuity; it has grown up under our twentieth-century noses. 

    In fact, the most important of the motion picture’s original reasons for being had nothing to do with its artistic potential. The theory underlying the motion picture was demonstrated in  a succession of optical toys. Its tools and 

materials were invented out of a desire to make visual records of life and to study the movements of animals, including humans. Its capacity to provide peep-show entertainment attracted paying customers to what scientists and 

inventors had made available. Later, as the novelty of lifelike movement began  to pale, the technicians and entrepreneurs who had discovered how to project moving images onto screens stumbled onto an old interest latent in

audiences—the story. They began to offer simple narratives in a new form. As in the novel, the play, music, or dance, an ordering of events into a beginning, middle, and end was required in even the simplest motion picture.