At last the splendid animals were lined up across the track, their small jockeys in their brilliantly coloured jackets hunched up like monkeys on their backs.  Then the enormous crowd was quiet, the band was still, even the noisy programme venders ceased calling their wares, and the photographer stood quietly beside his camera, the motor humming, his hand on the switch that starts the internal machinery.  Suddenly the starter dropped his arm, the barring gate flew up, and the horses sprang forward.  “They’re off!” came from a thousand throats in unison.  The band struck up a lively air, and the vast assemblage watched with excited eyes the flying horses.  As the horses swept on round the turn and down the back stretch the people seemed to be drawn from their seats, and by the time the racers made the turn leading into the home-stretch almost every one was standing and the roar of yelling voices was deafening.

All this time the photographer kept his eyes on his machine, which was rattling like a rapidly beaten drum, the cyclopean eye of the camera making impressions on a sensitised film-ribbon at the rate of forty a second, and every movement of the flying legs of the urging jockeys, even the puffs of dust that rose at the falling of each iron-shod hoof, was recorded for all time by the eye of the camera.

The horses entered the home-stretch and in a terrific burst of speed flashed by the throngs of yelling people and under the wire, a mere blur of shining bodies, brilliant colours of the jockeys’ blouses, and yellow dust.  The Suburban was over, and the great crowd that had come miles to see a race that lasted but a little more than two minutes (a grand struggle of giants, however), sank back into their seats or relaxed their straining gaze in a way that said plainer than words could say it, “It is over.”

It was 4:45 in the afternoon.  The photographer was all activity.  The minute the race was over the motor above the great camera was stopped and the box was opened.  From its dark interior another box about six inches square and two inches deep was taken:  this box contained the record of the race, on a narrow strip of film two hundred and fifty feet long, the latent image of thousands of separate pictures.

Then began another race against time, for it was necessary to take that long ribbon across the city of Brooklyn, over the Bridge, across New York, over the North River by ferry to Hoboken on the Jersey side, develop, fix, and dry the two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long film-negative, make a positive or reversed print on another two-hundred-and-fifty-foot film, carry it through the same photographic process, and show the spirited scene on the stereopticon screen of a metropolitan theatre the same evening.

That evening a great audience in the dark interior of a New York theatre sat watching a white sheet stretched across the stage; suddenly its white expanse grew dark, and against the background appeared “The Suburban, run this afternoon at 4:45 at Sheepshead Bay track; won by Alcedo, in 2 minutes 5 3-5 seconds.”