On the recommendation of Bray, Fleischer was hired as a technical illustrator for the Electro-Light Engraving Company in Boston. In 1909 he moved to Syracuse, New York, working as a catalog illustrator for the Crouse-Hinds Company, and a year later returned to New York as art editor for "Popular Science" magazine under editor Waldemar Klaempffert. By 1914, the first commercially-produced animated cartoons began to appear in movie theaters. They tended to be stiff and jerky. Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from live action film. This device, known as the rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. Although his patent was granted in 1917, Max and his brothers Joe and Dave Fleischer made their first series of tests between 1914 and 1916. The Pathé Film exchange offered Max his first opportunity as a producer due in part to the fact that Dave had been working there as a film cutter since 1914. Max chose a political satire of a hunting trip by Theodore Roosevelt. After several months of labor, the film was rejected, and Max was making the rounds again when he was reunited with John R. Bray at Paramount. Bray had a distribution contract with Paramount at the time, and hired Max as production supervisor for his studio. With the outbreak of World War I, Max was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to produce the first Army training films on subjects that included "Contour Map Reading", "Operating the Stokes Mortar", "Firing the Lewis Machine Gun", and "Submarine Mine Laying". Following the Armistice, Fleischer returned to Bray and the production of theatrical and educational films. Fleischer produced his "Out of the Inkwell" films featuring "The Clown" character, which his brother Dave originated; he had worked as a sideshow clown at Coney Island. It was one of the later tests made from footage of Dave as a clown that interested Bray. Fleischer's initial series was first produced at the Bray Studios and released as a monthly installment in the "Bray-Goldwyn Pictograph Screen Magazine" from 1919 to 1921. In addition to producing "Out of the Inkwell", Max's position at Bray was primarily production manager, and supervisor of a number of educational and technical films such as "The Electric Bell", "All Aboard for the Moon", and "Hello, Mars". And it was as production manager that Fleischer hired his first animator, Roland Crandall, who remained with him throughout the active years of Fleischer's studio.