[The Moving Picture World, 27 June 1914, page ?] An explosion, thought to have been caused by spontaneous combustion, destroyed the large film storage vault of the Lubin Film Manufacturing Company, at Twentieth Street and Indiana Avenue in Philadelphia, Saturday, June 13th, injuring a number of people and causing a property loss which is variously estimated between $500,000 and $1,000,000. / The following telegram received by The Moving Picture World Tuesday morning will answer the inevitable inquiries as the what effect the disaster will have upon the Lubin program: “Moving Picture World, 17 Madison Avenue, New York City. Through our good fortune in having as great facilities as we have, we will not have a single day’s interruption in our deliveries. Have increased our number of companies and with the well-known fighting spirit of Lubin behind us, it will not be many days before we are back on top again with films that will be better than ever.” / The explosion came about 10 0’clock in the morning without the slightest warning. No one was in the vault at the time, and that it was tightly closed up in given as the reason the force of the let-go which was sufficient to blow out an enture wall of brick and concrete eighteen inches thick. / Bricks and mortar were blown in every direction and a string of two-story houses on the same street were badly damaged, some of them being practically destroyed. Rolls of burning film were showered everywhere and many of the adjoining frame buildings were set on fire. It was fire that injured the Italian boy who is not expected to recover; he was playing in the street near the vault at the time of the explosion and his clothes were ignited by a roll of film. / About 500 people, including a number of actors and actresses, were at work in adjoining Lubin buildings at the time of the explosion and a panic were narrowly averted. Some of the girls who hurried from the buildings fainted because of the excitement and had to be taken into houses nearby for medical attention. Heroic action on the part of a number of the male employees resulted in saving a lot of valuable property which was threatened. Harry Meyers, one of the Lubin men, saw the little Italian boy as he fell in the street with his clothing ablaze and prevented the youngster’s certain death by beating out the flames in the boy’s clothes and carrying him to safety. / Early reports of the explosion included an estimate of the damage done made by Ira Lowery, general manager of the Lubin company, who said: “Some of the films which were destroyed had never been put on the market; others cannot be reproduced or duplicated. Our loss on films will be at least $500,000, and on the vault building about $5,000 more. The only explanation we can give for the explosion and fire is that sun, coming through one of the windows, so heated one of the tin cylinders holding a film that it exploded, setting the others off.” / Included in the damage done by the explosion, of course, must be the damage sustained by the property holders in the locality whose houses were either wrecked by the force of the explosion or burned by the resulting flames. Of these houses, sixteen were almost wholly destroyed and a score of others were damaged.

[The Motion Picture News, XX June 1914, pages 25, 74] A fire that did at least $500,000 damage before it was checked, XXXX