Read the next two selections and answer the questions that follow.
This excerpt is from a fictional account of the lives of Frank and Maud Baum. The couple is attending the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where many new inventions debuted.
(1) There was a line of people waiting to approach an upright wooden box shaped like a lectern. Frank explained that the device was called the Kinetoscope. The fellow at the front of the line was peering through what looked like binoculars into the interior of the box. Maud saw over and over again that as each person looked inside, they pulled away, gasped, laughed, or exclaimed, and then leaned toward the eyepiece again.
(2) "What is it?" Maud asked.
(3) "I'm not going to tell you. You have to see it for yourself."
(4) Frank and Maud had waited in line for almost two hours when at last it was
Maud's turn. She stood next to the box, bent over, and peeked inside. The operator pushed a button.
(5) Maud gasped. Inside the box, there were three tiny men-blacksmiths-hammering on an anvil. She drew her head away, and there she was, standing in front of the box, with Frank by her side. She put her head down again—it wasn't possible. It seemed that the men were moving inside the box. Black-and-white photographs that moved.
(6) Frank took his turn next, and begged for a second turn, and then a third, until the people standing in line behind them started to clamor for him to move along.
(7) Once outside, Frank couldn't stop talking about it. "That's the future, Maud.
Right there. The future."
(8) "It's fascinating," Maud said. "No doubt about that, and yet, I don't quite understand what it's for. Real moving people are all around us. Why do we need to see them moving in a picture?"
(9) "Because—oh, Maud. Do you really not see it? Everything it touches becomes immortal!"
(10) Maud shrugged. She liked the morning light shining through the elms at home in Fayetteville; she loved the way the clouds skidded across an endless Dakota sky. She didn't need a photograph or a moving picture to remember it. She did not understand what Frank saw in this machine.
(11) Maud wanted to linger and look at the displays, but Frank was dragging her along at a rapid clip, as if he had a specific mission. In the distance, the giant Chicago Wheel, studded with its thirty-six swinging cars, loomed up against the sky. When they had brought the boys to visit the fair, they had stood for hours, mesmerized, watching the wheel lift the lucky riders high into the air, then gracefully turn, each seat balancing so that the riders remained level even as the world turned. Frank had explained, to the boys' fascination, how the engineer, Ferris, had designed the wheel to rival the grand Eiffel Tower in Paris. At first everyone had been afraid to ride it. The spindly steel spokes didn't look as if they could support the massive lacquered cars, fitted with grilles, that could hold up to sixty people at a time. But Frank had read all about the wheel in the newspapers, and he explained that the structure was based on the most modern mechanical and electric techniques, including a double-sized Westinghouse air brake, just like those used on trains, as a safety feature. The idea of soaring through the air had intrigued the boys, but Maud had to put her foot down. They had paid fifty cents each to gain admission to the park, and another fifty cents each for five tickets to ride the Ferris wheel was out of the budget. They would have to watch from the ground.
(12) This time, Frank hustled her along without stopping for a second look at anything, until they reached the base of the giant wheel. The sun was hanging low over the lake now, the sky turning brilliant shades of purple and orange, and the fair's white buildings tinged with pink. Then suddenly, in an explosion like fireworks or a hundred shooting stars, the entire wheel burst into a confetti of electric light that danced and shimmered as the wheel spun through the air.
Excerpt(s) from FINDING DOROTHY: A NOVEL by Elizabeth Letts, copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Letts. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.