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What happens when you combine a carbon arc light, a billiard ball coating, a spoked wheel and consecutive images? Motion pictures! Complex and sometimes incredible events led to Thomas Edison's remarkable invention; the beginnings of limelight on a Irish mountain; George Eastman's production of celluloid from the slightly explosive gun cotton; the ""magic lantern"" of an Austrian ballistics teacher. Then Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet in 1872 by photographs; does a horse raise all four feet when galloping? (Yes.) Today moving pictures, together with television, are enormously powerful mass media. Have we become trapped by our own technology?