Why 'the Silver Screen'?

In 1898, the British film exhibitor Arthur Cheetham offered Londoners short reels of football matches "now shown on a new silver screen which brings the pictures out almost as well as electric light."

Cheetham proudly called his innovation a Silvograph, but the American film industry did not pick it up for over a decade. 

A new and improved version was unveiled in 1909 on the East Coast of the US, where Edison had helped to establish a nascent film industry. The Lyric Theatre in Smith St, New Jersey, was "equipped with a new patent silver-coated screen". 

Within a year, this was followed by a new, silver screen installed at the Gem theatre in North Dakota, "coated with aluminium or silver paint.... each picture stands out a great deal more distinctly than on the old screen."

Silver symbol

A silver screen became not only a technological upgrade but also a symbol of the glamour that cinema represented. Vaudeville encouraged audience participation, but films seem to come from a more remote, luxurious world. 

In 1916, The New York Times reported on an exhibition boasting "a parade of the stars of the silver screen".

Cinemas became dream factories - a notion brilliantly realised in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). But it was a white-hot bulb that lit that silver screen. That was as untouchable as those stars up there on it.  

And the celluloid was highly flammable - fires were common and not just in the flea pits. Even the super-rich studios were not immune - many original prints went up in smoke, never to be replaced.