Several of the early animators made their living by speed drawing.
J. Stuart Blackton demonstrated his speed drawing and animation ability in his 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces which was a mixture of speed drawing and animation.
Émile Cohl is credited with making the first completely animated film, Fantasmagorie, in early 1908. The film contained 700 separate drawings; each one drawn onto white rice paper over a light box to show the previous drawing in the sequence, and then photographed on to negative film. Even showing each drawing twice (twoing) it only ran for about 2 minutes and took him four months to complete.
On the right is an excerpt from the film while on the the left is something that was knocked up in SVG in under an hour.
Clearly, if this was to be turned into an industry, mass production was required.