User Reviews

This Robert Paul production directed by ex-stage magician Walter Booth is a comic warning about the effects of modernism. In this case, Professor Bakem offers his baby incubator, which will add a year's growth to an infant in a few minutes. But when the baby is put in the incubator, a fire starts, and when the baby is removed, it has the beard of an old man!

Although the production values are not as elaborate as those that Melies was employing, the frenetic movements of the players is highly reminiscent of Melies' actors. Perhaps this was Paul's response to the great success of ex-stage magician Melies' movies. The film industry was already international in scope and Paul understood that you give the public what it wants.

Robert Paul is a largely forgotten name today, but he was a major pioneer of British cinema, and was quick to grasp the commercial potential of cinema in ways that better known pioneers such as William Friese-Greene were not. He was more of a mechanic than a filmmaker making, with Birt Acres, his own camera on which to shoot films in 1895, and also Britain's first projector, the Animatograph, with which to screen them in 1896. Early in the 20th century he had a custom-made studio built in Muswell Hill.

This short (one minute) comedy film is based on a popular music hall sketch. In the film, Professor Bakem offers an incubation process to make babies bigger, but his assistant accidentally starts a fire under the incubator, which produces the inevitable results. For a comedy, it isn't very funny.

A mother brings her baby to "Pro Bakem's Baby Incubator", which is advertised to age a baby one year in only one hour. Left alone to tend the machine, the professors' clumsy assistant overturns the lamp being used to warm the incubator resulting in a minor conflagration and a shocking change far beyond the mother's expectations. Portraying a 'novel scientific technology' and pre-dating Méliès' 'Voyage to the Moon' (1903) by two years, Walter R. Booth's short, silent comedy is a candidate for the first science fiction film. Other candidates would include various takes on automatic sausage making machines, films featuring X-rays (an extant technology), and Zecca's contemporary 'À la Conquête de l'Air' (which also featured a novel technology, a somewhat fanciful flying machine, and included cutting-edge special effects, a split-screen to show the device flying over Paris). I don't know how the aging baby effect was done in Booth's film: there is an obvious jump in the film just after the baby is put in the incubator, which could be due a 'stop-trick' optical effect (the camera was stopped, the babies switched, the camera restarted) but it is also possible that the incubator simply had an off-camera rear hatch. As part of the joke involves a fire burning under the incubator - worrisome if the machine actually contained a child - the latter explanation is a bit more palatable. The film is essentially a one joke short but is worth the investment of a minute for anyone interested in the history of cinema, especially the science fiction genre. The film is also hard to rate - it's not that good but it is almost 120 years old, imaginative, and at the time may have been 'A-material' from one of Britain's top directors.