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  new, silver screen installed at the Gem theatre in North Dakota "coated with aluminum 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 that white-hot bulb that lit that silver screen was a 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.