Launching, No. 2 (1898)
This twenty-five second film is from Edison's "Southern Pacific Company" series. What we basically get to see is a Japanese ship as it is floating into a harbor in Southern California. Yep, that's all that happens and at 25-seconds it should go without saying that there's not too much room for anything else. I'm sure many would see a film like this and laugh that it was ever considering a film at all but if you enjoy these older bits of history then you should get a kick out of this one. As a part of history it's great to see this ship, which in itself has all sorts of history wrapped around it. The most interesting thing is that once the ship goes past where the camera is you can see how many rowboats are on both sides of it so people were obviously coming out to view the ship. Who knows if these same folks realized they were captured on film and someone would be watching them over 110-years later.
