1914 Lubin vault fire

In 1902, after five years of filming assorted rudimentary motion pictures, pioneer studio mogul Siegmund Lubin officially formed the Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia. 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. Dubbed "Lubinville" by the press, the complex of buildings there was at the time among the most elaborate and technically advanced motion picture facilities in the world, with labs capable of processing up to of film per week. The Lubin "film factory" included a studio with an area of . The studio had a slanted glass roof and glass walls supported by light steel framing. It also had costume rooms, property rooms, areas for set construction and equipment repair, a cafeteria, spaces for every phase of film processing, a large garage for servicing the plant's fleet of trucks and Lozier touring cars, and a five-story building that housed administrative offices, shops on its top floor for the manufacture of projectors, and the plant's shipping department in its basement. Also at Lubinville was the most up-to-date vault for storing and organizing the company's growing catalog of master negatives and prints for its theatrical releases, its historical films, and all other footage under its care. In addition to generating revenue from its own motion pictures, Lubinville earned substantial income by processing and assembling theatrical print copies for other studios, which explains why some master negatives and test prints for productions made by other companies were also stored in Lubinville's film vault. Various studios sent their negatives to Lubin for printing, for the Philadelphia firm was highly regarded in the motion picture industry for the superior clarity of its footage, a reputation represented by the company's logo, the image of the Liberty Bell accompanied by the motto "Clear As A Bell". 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: The film vault Lubinville's film vault was located at the "extreme southeastern corner of the plant", and for safety reasons it was positioned outside employee work areas and situated on the perimeter of the complex. The vault's lengthy front side, however, did not face empty lots; it faced North Garnet Street, a narrow residential street lined on the other side with two-story brick row houses. The combination produced a flexible and effective film strip for cameras, but it was also a highly sensitive material that could be easily ignited and burned intensely. Celluloid film, also referred to as nitrate film owing to its nitrocellulose base, only became more unstable and more hazardous as it aged. Off-gassing and heat were byproducts of the material as it continued to degrade over time, especially in storage conditions with excessive humidity and elevated temperatures. Film cans or reels containing deteriorating nitrate stock had the capability of "autoigniting" or spontaneously combusting. Once burning, the film was extremely difficult to extinguish since celluloid contains sufficient oxygen within its molecular structure to continue burning even when fully immersed in water. 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 with perimeter walls of red brick thick. The whole vault, running in length, was divided into five adjoining but "entirely separate" compartments or units, each measuring and separated from one another by interior walls, also brick, thick. This chambered configuration was intended to minimize losses and contain a blaze if one unit ever caught fire, reducing the likelihood of its migration to the other four. All of the units shared a reinforced concrete roof and concrete flooring that were thick, with access to each unit through individual sealed "bank-like" doors outfitted with burglar-proof locks. No lighting fixtures or devices with electrical "wiring of any sort" were installed inside the units. Lubin, like other motion picture studios and film-processing plants in that period, stored large quantities of exposed and raw nitrate stock, a material that seemed "determined to destroy itself", very often in flames by its "own volition". 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. Prior to the fire at Lubinville, employees there were described as working "secure in the knowledge that there was no place in the plant where a fire extinguisher or fire hose was not plainly visible and functional". News reports stated that the facility was "adequately equipped with hose lines", but employees were unable to battle the fire because there was no water pressure. Then, on May 13, 1914, exactly a month before the Lubinville disaster, yet another fire destroyed a large collection of films at Universal Pictures and "gutted" much of that company's six-story Colonial Hall facility at 102 West 101st Street in Manhattan. However, none of those earlier 1914 events was traced directly to spontaneous combustion or to some other film-related cause. At Eclair the fire originated near a production being staged inside the studio; at Edison a short circuit inside a lighting switchboard was blamed; and "defective insulation" was cited as the source of Universal's costly accident. Unfortunately for Edison, the company suffered a much worse fire at its headquarters in West Orange, New Jersey, later in 1914, on December 9. The origin of that catastrophic $7,000,000 loss for Edison ($ today) was attributed to "an exploding film" inside a building where nitrate footage was stored and inspected. That structure and several other larger buildings were completely destroyed, as were "all the Edison photoplays" kept at that site, along with "cameras and m. p. [motion picture] apparatus of immense value". ==June 13 fire and explosions==

On Saturday morning, June 13, 1914, during an extended summer heat wave in Philadelphia, "several hundred" employees were working at Lubinville. An undetected fire burning in one of the film vault's five units ignited celluloid gases that had built up inside the brick-and-concrete container. The resulting explosion had "ripped out the street side" of the structure and "shattered its roof", spreading the fire to other units, quickly setting alight millions of feet of highly flammable film stock and detonating three more violent explosions. "Flames shooting into the air over a hundred feet" and columns of thick dark smoke dominated the northern skyline of the city as the blasts hurled hundreds of metal film reels and cans with "blazing celluloid" in all directions, many high above the plant. With the collapse of the vault's walls from the explosions, fire spread to the plant's printing rooms and shops, and then to part of the site's highest structure, its five-story main building. Burning debris continued to fall from the sky, igniting additional small fires throughout the central compound. Several row houses on the other side of North Garnet Street were roasted by the fiery blasts, as were cars parked along the narrow street. 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. "Some of them", added the newspaper, "got a ladder and, climbing to the roof of the building, fought the fire with good effect." The visitor to the plant who was credited with saving Lubin employees from serious injury or possible death was a local professional boxer, Willie Houck. The featherweight title contender lived close to Lubinville, in the neighborhood of Mt. Airy in Northwest Philadelphia. Referred to as a "pugilist" and "lately a movie actor" in news coverage of the fire, Houck was reported to be "posing" in the studio for cameras when he heard the first explosion. Both The New York Times and the Chicago-based trade journal Motography described how the young boxer then "saved several girls who were in a panic at a window and about to jump." ==Suspected causes==

While the origin of the fire remained questionable and was never officially verified in subsequent investigations, some authorities and reports in trade publications in 1914 immediately attributed it to spontaneous combustion. One other theory that gained greater traction in the days and weeks after the disaster blamed Philadelphia's prolonged heat wave and the intense summer sun. Although not issued as the definitive and official cause for the disaster, it was the personal opinion of Ira M. Lowry, who was Lubinville's general manager and the son-in-law of Siegmund Lubin, that concentrated sunlight started the fire. His comments circulated to various news outlets soon after the fire. The popular trade paper Variety quotes him in its June 19 article "Lubin's Big Blaze": 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. "The fire", Lubin states, "will be a lesson and we will know where to store negatives the next time." With regard to the fire, he adds, "I don't believe that the fire started by itself" [spontaneous combustion]; "Some rays, may be, got through a prism and started the film burning." Several industry news sources picked up on Lowry's and Siegmund Lubin's comments and cited them jointly in articles as the most plausible explanation for the fire, if not the "official" reason for the tragic loss of so much material. In doing so, the publications advanced the "roof window" or "prism" theory that sunlight streaming through the thick glass of one of the vault unit's skylights had focused a beam on a film can or open reel in storage. Julian M. Soloman of Motion Picture News describes the theory in more detail in his article in the trade journal's June 27, 1914 issue: Yet, many of Lubinville's lower-level plant employees never accepted the spontaneous-combustion explanation or the "beam of light" theory since the skylights in the vault were fitted with frosted glass, which would have made the focusing of a beam and the magnification of its heat very unlikely. 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. Eckhardt, as a follow-up, also provides in his book some insight as to why that belief was not officially pursued: ==Losses==

Whatever the cause of the fire, it inflicted a staggering loss to Siegmund Lubin personally. The motion picture mogul tried to remain publicly the "stoical business man" when discussing the destruction of so many films, but the psychological impact of such a calamity was immediately apparent to insiders in the rapidly expanding film industry, including to reporters for leading trade publications. Motography, in a news article titled "Lubin Mourns Lost Negatives" and published four weeks after the event, challenged its readers to consider that impact. "Imagine, then, if you can", posed the journal, "what must be the loss to [Siegmund Lubin] who is forced to realize that every one of his historic negatives and the first prints of his first pictures are destroyed." Still, with the exceptions of that transfer, the existence of some Lubin prints that remained in circulation in domestic and foreign theaters, and to smaller numbers of wayward prints and stock footage stored at Lubin facilities outside of Pennsylvania, the flames of June 13 wiped out within a few minutes after the initial explosion the bulk of the company's entire cinematic history up to that day. Lost were small and large reels and film cans containing master negatives and prints for several thousand individual titles. Film types ranged from Siegmund Lubin's early and very brief experimental films to longer documentary footage on an array of subjects, along with pristine copies of the company's regular theatrical releases and of pictures produced by some other studios. All of those unexpected costs and other related expenses proved to be an "unbearable financial disaster" at that time for the Lubin Company, which was borrowing substantial amounts of money to finance its plans to produce longer, more elaborate films and to complete construction projects already under way at Betzwood and at the company's other properties. Borrowed sums were also needed to cover the financial drain caused by ongoing court battles on copyright and patent lawsuits filed against Lubin by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Injuries and deaths was widely praised for his "heroism" during the fire. A reel of flaming film hurled by the blast toward a nearby row house had struck the child. Another loss was the master negative and original archived print for the comedy short Outwitting Dad, Oliver Hardy's first credited screen performance. That Lubin production had been initially distributed on April 21, 1914, less than two months before the disaster, and over seven years before Hardy first appeared with Stan Laurel in the 1921 release The Lucky Dog. '' (1913), preserved now only in a few stills. The master negatives for two of Griffith's major 1914 dramas were also consumed in the fire: the "six-reeler" Home, Sweet Home, which premiered in Los Angeles on May 17, 1914, and Griffith's seven-reel adaptation of Paul Armstrong's play The Escape, already in limited released less than two weeks before the fire. Griffith had sent the negatives of both films to Lubinville so the Philadelphia company could process higher-quality prints of them for the director and for wider theatrical distribution. Prints of Home, Sweet Home survive from other sources, but The Escape is classified today as lost. Neither a full or partial print nor even a fragment of footage is known to exist from that film, which actress Lillian Gish, a costar in The Escape, characterized it as a "daring topic" about the horrors of syphilis, a photoplay that Gish said Griffith handled with "power and taste". In June 1914, Billboard, a Cincinnati-based publication that covered the music and film industries, confirmed the destruction of the Griffith negatives and some of the other important films that were reduced to ashes in Lubinville's disaster: Examples of other Lubin releases destroyed Lost Lubin titles include hundreds of Siegmund Lubin's early kinetoscopic and nickelodeon releases produced during "the pioneer period of the motion picture industry". Many of those are documented in Howard Lamarr Walls' 1953 reference Motion Pictures, 1894–1912, Identified from the Records of the United States Copyright Office. 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). Other lost films include a variety of productions with intriguing, rather strange and unexpected titles from the very early silent era, some that indicate productions with science-fiction, fantasy, educational, and human-interest themes: Trip to the Moon (1899), Sapho (1900), Ostrich Farm (1901), Lubin's Animated Drop-Curtain Announcing Slides (1901), A Trip to Mars (1903) Evolution of the Japanese with the added film description "from a curio-box to a world power in 50 years" (1905), A Dog Lost. Strayed or Stolen. $25 Reward. 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). Regrettably, too, the master negatives for cartoonist Vincent Whitman's animated 1914 productions A Trip to the Moon and A Dream of the Circus were among the casualties. 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. Although Lubin's A Trip to the Moon carried the same title as Georges Méliès' 1902 groundbreaking sci-fi French classic, the nine-minute 1914 animated comedy portrayed an entirely different story in which the protagonists reach the Moon by "aeroplane" instead of by a shell-shaped capsule propelled by a huge cannon. Documentary films lost Over nearly two decades, Siegmund Lubin had accumulated, either out of personal interest or for their commercial entertainment value, many hundreds of documentary films relating to historical events and notable personalities, from his first 1897 film of a horse eating hay to early 1914. 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. Soon after the fire, Mr. Lubin was generally reluctant to discuss the magnitude of the films destroyed, but he did express regret about the destruction of some particular footage in one interview: 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 west of Philadelphia. Lubin's camera crews traveled to the Gettysburg battlefield in 1913 and over the first three days of July filmed the greatest of all reunions. The footage they shot, all of which would burn less than a year later, was used to produce a final one-reel, 15-minute release. 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". • Yellowstone Park (1909) • The Great Ohio Flood (1913) • Funerals of various "foreign monarchs" (1902–1913), films that reportedly "had a large commercial interest abroad" Unique athletic and medical science films , the first African-American World Boxing Champion of the 20th century. More historical footage lost in the fire is listed in the previously cited reference Motion Pictures, 1894–1912 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. By the time he formally established the Lubin Manufacturing Company in 1902, Lubin was already experimenting with filming through different lenses and capturing moving images through microscopes and early x-ray cameras and later, in cooperation with Philadelphia's medical community, documenting surgeries, blood transfusions, and assorted ailments and debilitating disorders of many patients at local hospitals and in mental health facilities. 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. All of Lubin's medical films shot prior to the fire were destroyed. While there is no full accounting of those motion pictures or of other science-related footage stored in the demolished vault units, the titles and general descriptions of their content can be found in several published references. For instance, in the April 15, 1911 issue of The Moving Picture World, in a news feature titled "Pictures in Aid of Medical Science", the journal highlights how a few of Lubin's now-lost medical films were used: 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. 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. ==Recovery and new fire regulations==

To reassure the company's domestic and foreign distributors and for the benefit his employees' morale, Siegmund "Pop" Lubin acted immediately to repair facilities at his plant. The prompt action was also intended to demonstrate to the wider film community and to the general public that the studio would recover quickly and that the fire would not significantly disrupt the studio's existing production and release schedules. Only two weeks after the fire, in its June 27, 1914 issue, Motography reports assertions from Lubin's upper management that the company would rapidly resume normal operations: Motography also reports in the cited issue that while Siegmund Lubin himself professed that there would be no "hiatus" in the studio's releases, he did admit that "it may not be possible to replace immediately some of the [recently completed] films that burned." Those design plans were several months ahead of revised safety regulations or "consensus codes" recommended to studios in November 1914 by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Founded in New York City in 1896, the trade association focused considerable attention in its new guidelines on "The Storage of Nitro-Cellulose Motion Picture Films". The widespread coverage in trade publications of the highly destructive fires at Eclair, Edison, Universal, and at Lubinville in 1914 likely underscored to the film industry that additional safety regulations were needed for handing, transporting, and storing film collections. 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. Perhaps in response to the Lubin disaster and its cited cause, the guidelines addressed specifically the issue of skylights. While the proposed guidelines did not recommend banning them altogether, they did strongly discourage any further use of them in vaults, stating "To prevent abnormal temperature within the vault, glass windows and skylights should be avoided". ==Lubin's bankruptcy and closure==

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. The fire was certainly not the decisive factor in the studio's takeover and subsequent closure, but it was one contributing factor in a series of problems that confronted the Lubin Company between 1912 and 1916 and hastened its decline. Unlike some of Lubin's main competitors in that period, the company did not adjust as quickly to the changing tastes and expectations of theater audiences, who wanted longer, more elaborately staged films. That lagging response resulted in a decline in box-office revenue, a reduction made worse by political and military events in Europe, where World War I began only two weeks after the vault fire. As that conflict escalated, Lubin and other American filmmakers had to contend with many disruptions in their most lucrative overseas market. 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. 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. Additional loans and attempts to restructure the business failed. As a result, Siegmund Lubin effectively retired from the film industry in the final months of 1916, and news items the following year began referring to his business as the "old" and the "late Lubin Company". That year both Lubinville and Betzwood, which had continued to operate under receivership, were also sold. Unfortunately for the early cinematic history of the United States, less than 200 of the "nearly" 5,000 films produced by Lubin between 1897 and 1916 are known to survive. ==See also==