Cinéorama

This way, loyal to the epoch's spirit, an electric engineer from England named Robert W. Paul was making his own fame with the reproduction of copies based on pirated designs.

Sanson and Paul had talked about it at length about where was the world of "image moving" or "motion picture" going, comparing notes with their ideas about a visual future.

Robert Paul went on to invent the first commercial cinema projector in Great Britain, but his vision of a "moving image's journey through time" would never come to fruition.

The meeting with Paul should have been inspirational for Raoul Sanson as he returned to France with his own kinetoscope and immediately began to work on his own method to project images on a screen.

[3] Cinéorama consisted of 10 synchronized 70 mm movie projectors, projecting onto 10 9x9 meter screens arranged in a full 360° circle around the viewing platform.

The platform was a large balloon basket, capable of holding 200 viewers, with rigging, ballast, and the lower part of a huge gas bag.

Some references describe a much longer experience, involving a trip to England, Spain, and the Sahara, but it is unclear whether the complete plan was realized.

Extreme heat from the projectors' arc lights, in the booth below the audience, had caused one workman to faint, and the authorities were worried about the possibility of a deadly fire.

But whether the staging of Cinéorama actually occurred has been called into serious doubt by French cinéma historian Jean-Jacques Meusy who summarises [translation from French]:"Certainly Raoul Grimoin-Sanson had patented an apparatus consisting of ten shooting and projection devices and had built a pavilion in the Exposition to show the public the films he had made.

But, contrary to what its inventor had claimed in his memoirs [published in 1926] there was no public performance since the technology of the day did not, it seems, allow the necessary synchronisation of ten projectors".

[4]Meusy contends that the drawings of Cinéorama that we see today derive instead from publicity and press speculation about what the screening could have looked like if it had taken place as planned.