| The illusion of the live staged horse race depended upon a combination of treadmills and moving panoramas, machinery which developed from crude beginnings in the bucolic American entertainment Josiah Allen's Wife (1882) to become one of the notable scenic spectacles of the Edwardian stage. The race effect did not depend upon a unique invention, but upon the coordination of familiar machinery in a new combination, the moving panorama of the scenic background having long been a theatrical effect, and the treadmill upon which the horses ran a common item of agricultural machinery. This dissertation elucidates the development of the machinery of the race effect by means of examination of patent documents and descriptions in contemporary periodicals.; The fundamental machinery of the racing effect was perfected over a period of twenty-two years by Neil Burgess, an American character actor, who documented his developments in a series of patents filed between April 1882 and June 1911. The four-horse chariot mechanism he employed in The Year One in 1895 was adapted and improved by Claude Hagen for the spectacular race scene in Klaw and Erlanger's production of Ben-Hur (1899-1924), a scene which at times employed up to five chariot teams running upon treadmills backed by three moving panoramas.; The machinery employed by Burgess and Hagen appeared in England at the turn of the century, and inspired utilization of the race effect in three increasingly elaborate, spectacular, Drury Lane autumn melodramas, The Whip (1909), The Hope (1910), and Good Luck (1923).; Elaboration of the race effect, however, culminated at a time when cinema, which had been introduced recently and which more easily accommodated the presentation of spectacular realistic scenes, was depleting the audience for the live stage. The race effect, complicated and costly to produce, served to draw an audience through sheer wonder that such an effect could be accomplished on the living stage, but this aspect of its attraction was not ultimately enduring, and the machine enhanced, stage horse race vanished from the legitimate theatre. |
