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 didn't adopt it for over a decade. 

Edison

A new, improved version was unveiled in 1909 on the US East Coast, where Edison had helped 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, the Gem Theatre in North Dakota installed a new silver screen, "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 cinema's glamour. 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 a white-hot bulb lit that silver screen. That was as untouchable as the stars up there.  

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