Several buildings in the city served as the company's early downtown headquarters and production facilities, but the rapid growth of Lubin's business demanded much larger accommodations, so in 1910 he constructed a state-of-the-art studio and film-processing plant in North Philadelphia at the intersection of 20th Street and Indiana Avenue.

[10] In one of its 1914 issues, the trade paper Billboard explained how Lubinville received, processed, edited to specifications, and stored films for its studio customers: Although not generally known, the product of the Reliance and most of the Eastern Mutual companies are sent to this city in its raw state (directly from the cameras) to be developed.

[13] With concerns regarding the instability of nitrate film and the inherent dangers of storing it, many safety features were incorporated into the design and construction of Lubinville's one-story "fireproof" vault, which according to news accounts occupied a total area of 2,000 square feet (190 m2) with perimeter walls of red brick 13 inches (33 cm) thick.

In late afternoons or on overcast days when more light was needed, assigned "runners" or any other Lubin employee who entered the vault to retrieve, return, or to organize films, that person was required to use only a special battery-powered "hand flashlight".

[17] Reels and cans containing nitrate footage therefore posed a constant fire threat, with blazes at storage sites regularly reported in newspapers and trade publications in which film stock was blamed either as the cause or as a powerful accelerant in spreading any flame.

[20][21] Still, when the fires reached and ignited large quantities of film stored at all three locations, the blazes immediately intensified and spread rapidly, adding greatly to the firefighters' tasks of extinguishing the flames and increasing substantially the damage and repair costs at the sites.

[11][14] Seconds later, the "flying" reels, can lids, and fragments of footage began raining down, setting off more fires both on and off the Lubin property as the odors of sulfur dioxide and other toxic gases from the burning film filled the area.

Soon they were joined by Lubin set technicians, carpenters, film developers and assembly workers, mechanics, administrative staff, and actors, all of whom, after years of fire-drill training, had quickly evacuated their respective work areas.

[27] Some employees dared to remain behind in several plant locations in attempts to save "costly gowns and dresses of actresses"; grab drafts of "scenarios", completed scripts, and other important paperwork; and to carry out manageable pieces of expensive film-processing and production equipment.

[4][27] The center of destruction, the vault area, lay largely in heaps of charred rubble littered with twisted rebar, mangled covers and bases of film cans, and melted projection reels.

[1]Three weeks later in a separate interview with reporter W. Stephen Bush, which was published in the July 11 issue of The Moving Picture World, Siegmund Lubin reiterates Ira Lowry's comments about the fire's origins, although his statement, like his son-in-law's, is not delivered with any certainty or conviction.

Instead, as recorded in Joseph P. Eckhardt's 1997 biographical work The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin, employees held to another belief about the cause of the fire, an opinion based on their experience of daily plant operations and their personal knowledge about fellow workers at Lubinville.

Variety reported that once Myers saw the child on fire, the actor ran to him, smothered the flames with his own coat, and carried the youngster "through one of the blazing houses" to safety at a nearby drug store, "where an ambulance was summoned.

Michael Strogoff, with Jacob Adler in the lead, which has been extensively advertised by the Popular Plays and Players, Inc., as a big feature film, was destroyed in its negative form, but some prints had already been made and delivered, so the loss is not as serious as that to other producers like Griffiths [sic].

[45] Among the lists of standard drama and comedy shorts recorded in that reference are screen adaptations of many classics from literature such as Rip Van Winkle (1903), Beauty and the Beast (1903), Gulliver’s Travels (1903), Swiss Family Robinson (1903), Snow White (1903), and Julius Caesar (1908).

Apply to Mrs. Brown, 711 Park Ave. (1905), The Life of an Oyster (1907), Miraculous Eggs (1907), The Making of a Modern Newspaper (1907), The Evolution of Man—An Educated Chimpanzee (1908), Baxter's Brain Storm (1907), Acrobatic Pills (1908), Ten Minutes with Shakespeare (1908), A Female Fire Department (1908), The Hebrew Fugitive (1908), A, B, C's of the U.S.A. (1909), Brain-Serum (1909), The Fighting Cigar (1909), and In the Land of Upside Down (1909).

[47] Those two lost films, each released as one part of a two-film "split reel" in March and April respectively before the fire, were the first installments in a series of animated shorts that Whitman produced for the Philadelphia studio prior to end of 1915.

[49] Lubin during that period routinely dispatched roving camera crews "to capture on slide and motion picture film" assorted natural and man-made disasters and footage of prominent individuals and major political, military, and social events.

[30]More important documentary footage lost in 1914 was Lubin's recordings of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the American Civil War's pivotal clash between Confederate and Union forces that occurred in 1863 only 125 miles (201 km) west of Philadelphia.

That final cut included both grand ceremonies and personal moments: the arrival at Gettysburg of 55,000 war veterans, sweeping views of the attendees' huge encampment, parades of former high-ranging officers and enlisted troops, meetings of old field nurses, and scenes of various "Yankees and Rebels shaking hands".

Lubin possessed genuine footage as well as staged reproductions of famous turn-of-the-century title and non-title bouts involving fighters such as George Dixon, Joe Gans, Terry McGovern, Young Corbett II, and other boxing champions.

[54] His training in the anatomy of the human eye and his practical experience in manufacturing optical lenses led to Lubin's fascination with cameras and a growing expertise in the technology of still photography and then, by the late 1890s, in the new medium of moving pictures.

[55] Publicly, he was increasingly credited for personally expending "a great deal of money and much of his spare time" promoting the use of moving pictures for scientific purposes and, more specifically, in using films as a teaching tool for surgical training.

The Lubin Company furnished for this occasion a twelve-hundred-foot reel depicting some extraordinary views of a number of patients who had been carefully selected by Prof. Weisenburg...cases of locomotor ataxia, paralysis of one side of the body resulting from a hemorrhage in the brain, different forms of spinal cord disease, hysteria and different tremors and involuntary movements of the body...At the finish of the lecture there ensued a scene of the wildest enthusiasm....[56]Lubin worked extensively with Dr. Weisenburg, who today is recognized internationally as a pioneer in the use of "moving pictures" for comparative neurological studies and classroom instruction.

[57] Along with all the other losses in the fire, the destruction of so many innovative medical films was not only another blow to Siegmund Lubin personally but a true misfortune regarding the visual documentation of early 20th-century medicine and surgical practices in the United States.

New safety guidelines announced in the fall of 1914 by the NFPA were to be officially adopted by the organization in January 1915, and they included general specifications for film containers, storage cabinets, and for ventilation and lighting systems in vault construction.

[60] By mid-August 1916, slightly over two years after the vault fire, Lubin's mounting debts and dwindling financial reserves prompted creditors to move in and seize control of the company and to begin restructuring and systematically selling off its assets.

[63] The next year, in 1915, in an effort to improve substantially his company's theatrical releases, Siegmund Lubin more than doubled the production budgets for future screen projects, a move that required more loans and shutting down some operations outside of Pennsylvania to save money.

[64] Further exacerbating the studio's rising monetary pressures were the continuing legal expenses needed to defend itself in copyright and patent lawsuits filed by Edison, along with costs associated with countering federal anti-trust prosecutions.

[51] The rest are forever lost, falling victim to either dismissive neglect, excessive screenings and mishandling as individual prints moved between theaters, to improper storage, age and nitrate decomposition, or, most notably, to the devastating vault fire of 1914.