"Machine Made"

Science encroaches further and further upon Art. We accept now, as a matter of course, the marble cutters and casters every sculptor employs to reduce, more or less geometrically, the artist's plaster model to a tougher medium; and it is an exception indeed when an artist hews his own stone (as Rodin did). Now the lens supersedes the artist's eye, as the mechanical cutter has superseded his hand. Camera-made busts are causing a London flurry. One Howard M. Edmunds is the inventor of a process, very intricate, but briefly described as follows: Many very thin, parallel lines are marked on a piece of glass; by means of a lantern, these are projected and focused upon the face of the sitter. Two cameras (one at each side of the lantern) are used for photographing. The negative records a picture in three dimensions--the modeling, or curves, of the face and head being registered by the distortion into waves of parallel lines. A special carving machine, with a revolving cutter, then hews out of a block of the material chosen a series of furrows exactly corresponding to the curved lines in the photograph; when this is completed an almost perfect likeness of the subject is reproduced. Basrelief is as easily obtained as busts in the round, the degree of relief being adjusted by simple alteration of the positions of the cameras.

Photographs of busts of the first two sitters were published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London). The sitters were Justine Johnstone and George Arliss, famed American actorfolk