Diamonds

The Historical Society is pleased to announce that thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, we’ll be preserving an important example of early Rhode Island film making.

In 1915 the Eastern Film Company of Providence created a feature crime drama called Diamonds. It is one of the many films that Eastern Film Company made between 1914 and 1917, but one of the few that survive and one of only 14 films owned by the RIHS that were created by Eastern.  The exact plot for the film is not clear due to the unstable condition of the film, but we do know it includes a scene at the Narragansett Pier, an iconic locale in southern Rhode Island.  In addition to providing documentary evidence of Rhode Island at the time, Diamonds is also important in the history of film making as an example of an early film created before California became the dominant location for the film industry.

Diamonds is part of the Gordon Collection at the RIHS, a large collection of nitrate films found in a warehouse in Providence in the 1940s and donated in the 1970s.  No documentation on any of these films survives, apart from what little was written about them in the contemporary press.

Diamonds currently exists only as a negative on cellulose nitrate film.  Nitrate was the first plastic used as the base for photographic negatives and is very unstable and quite flammable (see the video below).  Small rolls of film deemed unusable would sometimes be sold by film companies to kids who would light one end like a fuse and watch the film go up like flashpaper.  Nitrate film burns fast and bright.  The replacement of nitrate plastic with the more stable acetate plastic, aka “safety” film, happened slowly starting in 1908 with the production of the first safety film for still cameras.  The production and use of nitrate plastic for use in photography didn’t end completely until the 1960s.*.

In addition to this inherent flaw, Diamonds is also showing signs of decomposition, thanks to poor storage conditions earlier in its life. So for these reasons—and also in the hope of making the film more accessible—we’ll soon be working with Cinema Arts, a Pennsylvania film restorer to create preservation copies of the film**. We’ll also be creating a DVD copy to make the film easier to use for researchers, and we hope to screen a copy of the movie during an event next year.

Through a similar collaborative process, the Historical Society has already preserved a number of important early films, including My Lady of the Lilacs, an image from which appears below.

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*National Park Service. Museum Handbook, Part I, Appendix M, Management of Cellulose Nitrate and Cellulose Ester Film, 1999. http://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/MHI/AppendM.pdf

** Tech Specs: One 35mm fine grain master(wet gate from original nitrate negative), one 35mm duplicate negative, one 35mm black and white projection print, and one Beta SP video master.

Robots in Providence

The item described here answers the age-old question of what to do on a Saturday afternoon. In this case, the Saturday afternoon in question is November 19, 1796 at 3:00 PM. And the entertainment is a demonstration of a “Chinese automaton figure”.

Depicted above is a broadside from our graphics collection (Broadsides, 1796)*, which advertises the exhibition. An automaton is essentially a robot, and people have been building automata for centuries, ranging from programmable robots of the 1st century BCE, through a medieval floating robot band to automata that are still produced today (including the Chuck E Cheese animatronic animals).

In this case, the automaton performed “feats on the rope”—which, judging from the woodcut illustration, included playing a triangle on a tightrope: seemingly an impressive accomplishment for a robot even today. All this would be exciting enough in its own right, but this performance gains extra intrigue by showcasing a “Chinese” automaton. In 1796, it’s likely that the average Rhode Islander would never have seen anyone from China before. In fact, Chinese settlement in Rhode Island wouldn’t begin in earnest until late in the nineteenth century: the 1865 census reported only a single Chinese resident in the entire state.** As Lena Reynoso points out, “the first ‘foreigners’ exhibited in America often had no pulse.”***

Pieces of ephemeral advertising like this also offer a unique view into the social anxieties of their time. Note, for instance, that four separate rooms were to be provided in Mr. Thurber’s Tavern, ensuring that “Ladies or select Companies will be less incommoded” and that a police officer will be in attendance “to keep good Order.” Apparently the promoter, “Mr. Cressin”—who also toured the country with a pair of monkeys named Gibonne and Coco—was forced to relocate his show from Newburyport’s rowdy wharf area.****

And what was the cost of this entertaining afternoon? There are a number of ways to measure the relative worth of a 1796 dollar to a 2009 dollar, and they give a range of values for what that $.25 would be worth today:

• $4.20: A little less than today’s matinée movie ticket, if measured by the most literal scale, the Consumer Price Index.
• $68.99: A discount ticket to a Broadway show, if measured as a portion of the typical wage of an unskilled worker.
• $8,601.29: Buying a plasma widescreen TV and home theater sound system, if measured as a relative share of the Gross Domestic Product.

Throwing out the high value, it’s clear that a visit to the automaton exhibition would have been an expensive, if not prohibitively so, afternoon or evening of entertainment. But probably worth every penny.

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* Alden, #1506

** See Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island Ethnic Heritage Fact Sheets. Providence: Rhode Island Publications Society, 1980. pp. 34-6.

*** Lena Reynoso, “Tourism, Bodies and Display in America 1769-1900.”  Early America Review (Winter/Spring 2008). http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2008_winter_spring/popular-american-amusements.html. (Part of Archiving Early America, an ad-supported website)

**** Scott C. Martin, Cultural change and the market revolution in America, 1789-1860. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Odd Fellows Indeed

Secret societies have an enduring appeal and they’ve prompted speculation about their motivations and influence for a long time. Why are they secretive? What powerful people are members, and how does their membership affect their decisions? Popular fiction and movies frequently base their plots on groups like the Freemasons or Illuminati or other shadowy organizations.

But secret societies aren’t entirely serious all the time. The item depicted above* is a compilation of three separate pieces of printed ephemera dealing with TRIAEOAOF: The Rhode Island Association of Economical and Odd Fellows (also known to detractors as The Rascally and Ignorant Abominable Officious Evil Arrogant Odd Fellows).

The top item is a brief (but typographically fascinating) announcement of a Saturday evening meeting in 1826. It employs backward type, upside-down type, and type of varying sizes to express either chaotic whimsy or a parody of secretive encrypted messages:

It is attached to the second item, a “circular” providing more details about the event, which must have been an interesting affair if it followed the description here:

The final item is a ticket to the meeting, filled out for Pardon Miller. The 1826 Providence city directory lists Miller as a watchmaker located at 47 Cheapside**. The directory also lists a John Wilder, who is described as an inn-keeper at 18 Market Square, which is presumably where the event was held.

According to a memoir of the period, TRIAEOAOF was founded as a debating society in 1825 and took upon itself the mission of properly celebrating historical anniversaries such as Washington’s birthday.*** Apparently the group’s members were drawn from Providence’s most important and powerful citizens, and the group was able to exert real influence in state politics.

Although similarly named, TRIAEOAOF apparently bore no relation to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which also later operated in Providence. The Odd Fellows Directory**** of 1845 offers a brief history of the organization, which wasn’t founded in Providence until 1829, three years later than the item discussed here. Outlining the founding of the Rhode Island IOOF—a much more serious and religiously-focused organization than TRIAEOAOF, to gauge by the Directory—the author describes “a strong prejudice which was felt toward all secret societies”, and the IOOF was forced to close between 1832 (only three years after their founding) and 1843.

RIHS collections include much more material related to organizations like these, including the papers of the Rhode Island branch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

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* Broadsides-G1157, 1826

** He is also listed in James Gibbs’ “Horologic Rhode Island Visited.”  Bulletin of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors 14 (1970): 807. His brief biography includes mention of his being a first lieutenant in the Militia.

***Almon Danforth Hodges, Almon Danforth Hodges and his neighbors: An autobiographical sketch of a typical old New Englander. [T.R. Marvin & Son, Printers], 1909. Pages 153-6 detail the founding of TRIAEOAOF and its activities.

**** B. F. Moore, The Odd Fellows Directory. Providence: B. F. Moore, 1845. HS 969 .R4 O3 1845.

Nineteenth-Century Twitter

Cultural critics have gone back and forth about the effect that technologies like text messaging or Twitter are having on the future of communication, asking, for instance, whether Twitter’s 140-character limit presages the death of the English language*. But, as is often the case, the new is already quite old; the 21st century didn’t invent brevity:

This is a detail from the “Social Salad” column, which ran on the front page of the Sunday Morning Transcript in Providence during 1883 and 1884. (To view a full-page image, click here.) This example is from the edition of 3 February 1884, and it includes brief, straightforward notices of society gossip (“Mrs. Wm. H. Gill, of West Hartfield is visiting friends in town.”) as well as aphoristic observations along the lines of those typically found in an almanac (“A warm kitchen is a safer abiding place on Sunday than a cold church.”).

The Rhode Island Historical Society is the repository for the Rhode Island Newspaper Project, and holds the largest collection of Rhode Island Newspapers in existence. For more information, visit the Library website.

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* See, for instance, Lily Huang, “The Death of English (LOL).” Newsweek, August 11, 2008.