![Kinetoscope](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Kinetoscope.jpg)
The Kinetoscope is an
early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a
peephole
A peephole, peekhole, spyhole, doorhole, magic eye, magic mirror or door viewer, is a small, round opening through a door from which a viewer on the inside of a dwelling may "peek" to see directly outside the door. The lenses are made and arr ...
viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a
movie projector
A movie projector is an optics, opto-mechanics, mechanical device for displaying Film, motion picture film by projecting it onto a movie screen, screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices ...
, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of
video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...
: it created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of
perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in New Jersey also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative
motion picture camera
A movie camera (also known as a film camera and cine-camera) is a type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either on an image sensor or onto film stock, in order to produce a moving image to project onto a movie sc ...
with rapid
intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.
A Kinetoscope prototype was first semipublicly demonstrated to members of the National Federation of Women's Clubs invited to the Edison laboratory on May 20, 1891. The completed version was publicly unveiled in Brooklyn two years later, and on April 14, 1894, the first commercial exhibition of motion pictures in history took place in New York City, using ten Kinetoscopes. Instrumental to the birth of American movie culture, the Kinetoscope also had a major impact in Europe; its influence abroad was magnified by Edison's decision not to seek international
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
s on the device, facilitating numerous imitations of and improvements on the technology. In 1895, Edison introduced the Kinetophone, which joined the Kinetoscope with a
cylinder
A cylinder (from ) has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base.
A cylinder may also be defined as an infin ...
phonograph
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
. Film projection, which Edison initially disdained as financially nonviable, soon superseded the Kinetoscope's individual exhibition model. Numerous motion picture systems developed by Edison's firm in later years were marketed with the name Projecting Kinetoscope.
Development
![MonkeyshinesStrip](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/MonkeyshinesStrip.jpg)
An encounter with the work and ideas of photographic pioneer
Eadweard Muybridge appears to have spurred
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
to pursue the development of a motion picture system. On February 25, 1888, in
Orange, New Jersey, Muybridge gave a lecture amid a tour in which he demonstrated his
zoopraxiscope
The zoopraxiscope (initially named ''zoographiscope'' and ''zoogyroscope'') is an early device for displaying moving images and is considered an important predecessor of the movie projector. It was conceived by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muy ...
, a device that projected sequential images drawn around the edge of a glass disc, producing the illusion of motion. Edison's laboratory was close by, and either or both Edison and his company's official photographer,
William Dickson, may have attended. Two days later, Muybridge and Edison met at the Edison lab in
West Orange and discussed the possibility of joining the zoopraxiscope with the Edison
phonograph
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
—a combination system that would play sound and images concurrently. No such collaboration was undertaken, but in October 1888, Edison filed a preliminary claim, known as a caveat, with the
U.S. Patent Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexan ...
announcing his plans to create a device that would do "for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear". It is clear that it was intended as part of a complete audiovisual system: "we may see & hear a whole Opera as perfectly as if actually present". In March 1889, a second caveat was filed, in which the proposed motion picture device was given a name, Kinetoscope, derived from the Greek roots ''
kineto-'' ("movement") and ''
scopos'' ("to view").
Edison assigned Dickson, one of his most talented employees, to the job of making the Kinetoscope a reality. Edison would take full credit for the invention, but the historiographical consensus is that the title of creator can hardly go to one man:
While Edison seems to have conceived the idea and initiated the experiments, Dickson apparently performed the bulk of the experimentation, leading most modern scholars to assign Dickson with the major credit for turning the concept into a practical reality. The Edison laboratory, though, worked as a collaborative organization. Laboratory assistants were assigned to work on many projects while Edison supervised and involved himself and participated to varying degrees.
Dickson and his then lead assistant, Charles Brown, made halting progress at first. Edison's original idea involved recording pinpoint photographs, 1/32 of an inch wide, directly on to a cylinder (also referred to as a "drum"); the cylinder, made of an opaque material for positive images or of glass for negatives, was coated in
collodion to provide a photographic base. An audio cylinder would provide synchronized sound, while the rotating images, hardly operatic in scale, were viewed through a microscope-like tube. When tests were made with images expanded to a mere 1/8 of an inch in width, the coarseness of the
silver bromide emulsion used on the cylinder became unacceptably apparent. Around June 1889, the lab began working with sensitized
celluloid sheets, supplied by John Carbutt, that could be wrapped around the cylinder, providing a far superior base for the recording of photographs. The first film made for the Kinetoscope, and apparently the first motion picture ever produced on photographic film in the United States, may have been shot at this time (there is an unresolved debate over whether it was made in June 1889 or November 1890); known as ''
Monkeyshines, No. 1
''Monkeyshines'' is a series of experimental short silent films made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope, and are believed to be the first films shot in the United States.
''Monkeyshines, No. 1'' was shot by William K. L. Dick ...
'', it shows an employee of the lab in an apparently tongue-in-cheek display of physical dexterity. Attempts at synchronizing sound were soon left behind, while Dickson would also experiment with disc-based exhibition designs.
![EdisonExpo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/EdisonExpo.jpg)
The project would soon head off in more productive directions, largely impelled by a trip of Edison's to Europe and the
Exposition Universelle in Paris, for which he departed August 2 or 3, 1889. During his two months abroad, Edison visited with scientist-photographer
Étienne-Jules Marey, who had devised a "
chronophotographic gun
The chronophotographic gun is one of the ancestors of the movie camera. It was invented in 1882 by Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist and chronophotographer. It could shoot 12 images per second and it was the first invention to capture movi ...
"—the first portable motion picture
camera
A camera is an Optics, optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), ...
—which used a strip of flexible film designed to capture sequential images at 12 frames per second. Upon his return to the United States, Edison filed another patent caveat, on November 2, which described a Kinetoscope based not just on a flexible filmstrip, but one in which the film was perforated to allow for its engagement by
sprockets, making its mechanical conveyance much more smooth and reliable. The first motion picture system to employ a perforated image band was apparently the Théâtre Optique, patented by French inventor
Charles-Émile Reynaud in 1888. Reynaud's system did not use photographic film, but images painted on gelatine frames. At the Exposition Universelle, Edison would have seen both the Théâtre Optique and the
electrical tachyscope of German inventor Ottamar Anschütz. This disc-based projection device, also known as the Schnellseher ("quick viewer"), is often referred to as an important conceptual source for the development of the Kinetoscope. Its crucial innovation was to take advantage of the
persistence of vision theory by using an intermittent light source to momentarily "freeze" the projection of each image; the goal was to facilitate the viewer's retention of many minutely different stages of a photographed activity, thus producing a highly effective illusion of constant motion. By late 1890, intermittent visibility would be integral to the Kinetoscope's design.
The question of when the Edison lab began working on a filmstrip device is a matter of historical debate. According to Dickson, in mid-1889, he began cutting the stiff celluloid sheets supplied by Carbutt into strips for use in such a prototype machine; in August, by his description, he attended a demonstration of
George Eastman's new flexible film and was given a roll by an Eastman representative, which was immediately applied to experiments with the prototype. As described by historian Marta Braun, Eastman's product
was sufficiently strong, thin, and pliable to permit the intermittent movement of the film strip behind cameralens at considerable speed and under great tension without tearing ... stimulat ngthe almost immediate solution of the essential problems of cinematic invention.
![KinetographKayser2bis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/KinetographKayser2bis.jpg)
Some scholars—in particular,
Gordon Hendricks
Gordon Hendricks (1917–1980) was an American art and film historian.
In 1961 Hendricks published ''The Edison Motion Picture Myth'' in which he showed that it was not Thomas Alva Edison who should be attributed with the invention of the fi ...
, in ''The Edison Motion Picture Myth'' (1961)—have argued that the lab began working on a filmstrip machine much later and that Dickson and Edison misrepresented the date to establish priority for reasons of both patent protection and intellectual status. In any event, though film historian David Robinson claims that "the cylinder experiments seem to have been carried on to the bitter end" (meaning the final months of 1890), as far back as September 1889—while Edison was still in Europe, but corresponding regularly with Dickson—the lab definitely placed its first order with the Eastman company for roll film. Three more orders for roll film were placed over the next five months.
Only sporadic work was done on the Kinetoscope for much of 1890 as Dickson concentrated on Edison's unsuccessful venture into ore milling—between May and November, no expenses at all were billed to the lab's Kinetoscope account. By early 1891, however, Dickson and his new chief assistant,
William Heise, had succeeded in devising a functional strip-based film viewing system. In the new design, whose mechanics were housed in a wooden cabinet, a loop of horizontally configured 3/4 inch (19 mm) film ran around a series of spindles. The film, with a single row of perforations engaged by an electrically powered sprocket wheel, was drawn continuously beneath a magnifying lens. An electric lamp shone up from beneath the film, casting its circular-format images onto the lens and thence through a peephole atop the cabinet. The device incorporated a rapidly spinning shutter whose purpose—as described by Robinson in his discussion of the completed version—was to "permi
a flash of light so brief that
achframe appeared to be frozen. This rapid series of apparently still frames appeared, thanks to the persistence of vision phenomenon, as a moving image."
[Robinson (1997), p. 34.] The lab also developed a
motor-powered camera, the Kinetograph, capable of shooting with the new sprocketed film. To govern the intermittent movement of the film in the camera, allowing the strip to stop long enough so each frame could be fully exposed and then advancing it quickly (in about 1/460 of a second) to the next frame, the sprocket wheel that engaged the strip was driven by an
escapement
An escapement is a mechanical linkage in mechanical watches and clocks that gives impulses to the timekeeping element and periodically releases the gear train to move forward, advancing the clock's hands. The impulse action transfers energy to ...
disc mechanism—the first practical system for the high-speed stop-and-go film movement that would be the foundation for the next century of
cinematography
Cinematography (from ancient Greek κίνημα, ''kìnema'' "movement" and γÏάφειν, ''grà phein'' "to write") is the art of motion picture (and more recently, electronic video camera) photography.
Cinematographers use a lens to focu ...
.
![ButterflyDancebis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/ButterflyDancebis.jpg)
On May 20, 1891, the first invitational demonstration of a prototype Kinetoscope was given at the laboratory for approximately 150 members of the National Federation of Women's Clubs. The
New York ''Sun'' described what the club women saw in the "small pine box" they encountered:
In the top of the box was a hole perhaps an inch in diameter. As they looked through the hole they saw the picture of a man. It was a most marvelous picture. It bowed and smiled and waved its hands and took off its hat with the most perfect naturalness and grace. Every motion was perfect....
The man was Dickson; the little movie, approximately three seconds long, is now referred to as ''
Dickson Greeting''. On August 24, three detailed patent applications were filed: the first for a "Kinetographic Camera", the second for the camera as well, and the third for an "Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects". In the first Kinetograph application, Edison stated, "I have been able to take with a single camera and a tape-film as many as forty-six photographs per second...but I do not wish to limit the scope of my invention to this high rate of speed...since with some subjects a speed as low as thirty pictures per second or even lower is sufficient." Indeed, according to the Library of Congress archive, based on data from a study by historian
Charles Musser, ''Dickson Greeting'' and at least two other films made with the Kinetograph in 1891 were shot at 30 frames per second or even slower. The Kinetoscope application also included a plan for a
stereoscopic
Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the depth perception, illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stere ...
film projection system that was apparently abandoned.
Early in 1892, steps began to make coin operation, via a nickel slot, part of the mechanics of the viewing system. Before the end of the year, the design of the Kinetoscope was essentially complete. The filmstrip, based on stock manufactured first by Eastman, and then, from April 1893, by New York's Blair Camera Co., was 1 3/8 inches wide; each vertically sequenced frame bore a rectangular image, 1 inch wide by 3/4 inch high, and four perforations on each side. Within a few years, this basic format—with the
gauge
Gauge ( or ) may refer to:
Measurement
* Gauge (instrument), any of a variety of measuring instruments
* Gauge (firearms)
* Wire gauge, a measure of the size of a wire
** American wire gauge, a common measure of nonferrous wire diameter, es ...
known by its metric equivalent,
35 mm 35 mm may refer to:
* 135 film, a type of still photography format commonly referred to as 35 mm film
* 35 mm movie film, a type of motion picture film stock
* 35MM 35 mm may refer to:
* 135 film, a type of still photography format ...
—would be adopted globally as the standard for motion picture film, which it remains to this day. The publication in the October 1892 ''Phonogram'' of
cinematographic
Cinematography (from ancient Greek κίνημα, ''kìnema'' "movement" and γÏάφειν, ''grà phein'' "to write") is the art of motion picture (and more recently, electronic video camera) photography.
Cinematographers use a lens to focus ...
sequences shot in the format demonstrates that the Kinetograph had already been reconfigured to produce movies with the new film.
As for the Kinetoscope itself, there have been differing descriptions of the location of the shutter providing the crucial intermittent visibility effect. According to a report by inventor
Herman Casler
Herman Casler (March 12, 1867 in Sandwich, Illinois – July 20, 1939 in Canastota, New York) was an American inventor and co-founder of the partnership called the K.M.C.D. Syndicate, along with W.K-L. Dickson, Elias Koopman, and Henry Marvin ...
described as "authoritative" by Hendricks, who personally examined five of the six still-extant first-generation devices, "Just above the film,...a shutter wheel having five spokes and a very small rectangular opening in the rim
otatesdirectly over the film. An incandescent lamp...is placed below the film...and the light passes up through the film, shutter opening, and magnifying lens...to the eye of the observer placed at the opening in the top of the case." Robinson, on the other hand, says the shutter—which he agrees has only a single slit—is positioned lower, "between the lamp and film".
The Casler–Hendricks description is supported by the diagrams of the Kinetoscope that accompany the 1891 patent application, in particular, diagram 2. A side view, it does not illustrate the shutter, but it shows the impossibility of it fitting between the lamp and the film without a major redesign and indicates a space that seems suitable for it between the film strip and the lens. Evidently, that major redesign took place, as Robinson's description is confirmed by photographs of multiple Kinetoscope interiors, two among the holdings of
The Henry Ford
The Henry Ford (also known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village, and as the Edison Institute) is a history museum complex in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, Dearborn, Michigan, United States. The museum ...
and one that appears in Hendricks's own book.
On February 21, 1893, a patent was issued for the system that governed the intermittent movement of film in the Kinetograph (though one was not granted for a version of the camera as a whole until 1897). The escapement-based mechanism would be superseded within a few years by competing systems, in particular those based on the so-called
Geneva drive
The Geneva drive or Maltese cross is a gear mechanism that translates a continuous rotation movement into intermittent rotary motion.
The ''rotating drive'' wheel is usually equipped with a pin that reaches into a slot located in the other wh ...
or "Maltese cross" that would become the norm for both movie cameras and projectors. The exhibition device itself—which, despite erroneous accounts to the contrary, never employed intermittent film movement, only intermittent lighting or viewing—was finally awarded its patent, number 493,426, on March 14. The Kinetoscope was ready to be unveiled.
Going public
![BlackMariabis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/BlackMariabis.jpg)
The premiere of the completed Kinetoscope was held not at the
Chicago World's Fair, as originally scheduled, but at the
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. The first film publicly shown on the system was ''
Blacksmith Scene
''Blacksmith Scene'' (also known as ''Blacksmith Scene #1'' and ''Blacksmithing Scene'') is an 1893 American short black-and-white silent film directed by William K.L. Dickson, the Scottish-French inventor who, while under the employ of Thomas ...
'' (aka ''Blacksmiths''); directed by Dickson and
shot
Shot may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* ''Shot'' (album), by The Jesus Lizard
*''Shot, Illusion, New God'', an EP by Gruntruck
*''Shot Rev 2.0'', a video album by The Sisters of Mercy
* "Shot" (song), by The Rasmus
* ''Shot'' (2017 fi ...
by Heise, it was produced at the new Edison moviemaking studio, the world's first, known as the
Black Maria
Black Maria may refer to:
Art and literature
*Black Mariah (comics), a character in the Luke Cage comics series
*List of One Piece characters#Animal Kingdom Pirates, Black Maria, a character in the manga series ''One Piece''
*Black Maria (nove ...
. Despite extensive promotion, a major display of the Kinetoscope, involving as many as twenty-five machines, never took place at the Chicago exposition. Kinetoscope production had been delayed in part because of Dickson's absence of more than eleven weeks early in the year with a nervous breakdown. Hendricks, referring to various accounts, including ones in the July 22 ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'' and the October 21 ''
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...
'', argues that one Kinetoscope did make it to the fair. Robinson, in contrast, argues that such "speculation" is "conclusively dismissed by an 1894 leaflet issued for the launching of the invention in London," which states, "the Kinetoscope was not perfected in time for the great Fair." Echoing Hendricks's position, fair historian Stanley Appelbaum states, "Doubt has been cast on the reports of
he Kinetoscope's
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana ã¸
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...
actual presence at the fair, but these reports are numerous and circumstantial." Noting that the fair featured up to two dozen Anschütz Schnellsehers—some or all of a peephole, not projection, variety—film historian Deac Rossell asserts that their presence "is the reason that so many historical sources were confused for so long....
yone who made a clear claim to see the Kinetoscope undoubtedly saw the Schnellseher under its deliberately deceptive name of The Electrical Wonder."
Work proceeded, though slowly, on the Kinetoscope project. On October 6, a U.S.
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
was issued for a "publication" received by the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
consisting of "Edison Kinetoscopic Records." It remains unclear what film was awarded this, the first motion picture copyright in North America. By the turn of the year, the Kinetoscope project would be reenergized. During the first week of January 1894, a five-second film starring an Edison technician was shot at the Black Maria; ''
Fred Ott's Sneeze
''Fred Ott's Sneeze'' (also known as ''Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze'') is an 1894 short, black-and-white, silent film shot by William K.L. Dickson and featuring Fred Ott. It is the oldest surviving motion picture with a copyright.
In t ...
'', as it is now widely known, was made expressly to produce a sequence of images for an article in ''
Harper's'' magazine. Never intended for exhibition, it would become one of the most famous Edison films and the first identifiable motion picture to receive a U.S. copyright.
[Musser (2002), p. 21.] With commercial exploitation close at hand, on April 1, the motion picture operation was formally made the Kinetograph Department of the
Edison Manufacturing Company, for which Edison appointed a new vice president and general manager: William E. Gilmore. Two weeks later, the Kinetoscope's epochal moment arrived.
On April 14, 1894, a public Kinetoscope parlor was opened by the Holland Bros. in New York City at 1155 Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street—the first commercial motion picture house. The venue had ten machines, set up in parallel rows of five, each showing a different movie. For 25 cents a viewer could see all the films in either row; half a dollar gave access to the entire bill. The four-foot-tall machines were purchased from the new Kinetoscope Company, which had contracted with Edison for their production; the firm, headed by Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon, included among its investors Andrew M. Holland, one of the entrepreneurial siblings, and Edison's former business chief, Alfred O. Tate. The ten films that comprise the first commercial movie program, all shot at the Black Maria and each running about 15 to 20 seconds, were descriptively titled: ''Barber Shop'', ''Bertoldi (mouth support)'' (Ena Bertoldi, a British vaudeville contortionist), ''Bertoldi (table contortion)'', ''Blacksmiths'', ''Roosters'' (some manner of cock fight), ''Highland Dance'', ''Horse Shoeing'', ''Sandow'' (
Eugen Sandow
Eugen Sandow (born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, ; 2 April 1867 – 14 October 1925) was a German bodybuilder and showman from Prussia. Born in Königsberg, Sandow became interested in bodybuilding at the age of ten during a visit to Italy. After a ...
, a German strongman managed by
Florenz Ziegfeld
Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. (; March 21, 1867 – July 22, 1932) was an American Broadway impresario, notable for his series of theatrical revues, the ''Ziegfeld Follies'' (1907–1931), inspired by the ''Folies Bergère'' of Paris. He also p ...
), ''Trapeze'', and ''Wrestling''. As historian Charles Musser describes, a "profound transformation of American life and performance culture" had begun.
[
]
Twenty-five cents for no more than a few minutes of entertainment was hardly cheap diversion. For the same amount, one could purchase a ticket to a major vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
theater; when America's first amusement park
An amusement park is a park that features various attractions, such as rides and games, as well as other events for entertainment purposes. A theme park is a type of amusement park that bases its structures and attractions around a central ...
opened in Coney Island
Coney Island is a peninsular neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is bounded by Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, Manhattan Beach to its east, L ...
the following year, a 25-cent entrance fee covered admission to three rides, a performing sea lion show, and a dance hall. The Kinetoscope was an immediate success, however, and by June 1, the Hollands were also operating venues in Chicago and San Francisco. Entrepreneurs (including Raff and Gammon, with their own International Novelty Co.) were soon running Kinetoscope parlors and temporary exhibition venues around the United States. New firms joined the Kinetoscope Company in commissioning and marketing the machines. The Kinetoscope exhibition spaces were largely, though not uniformly, profitable. After fifty weeks in operation, the Hollands' New York parlor had generated approximately $1,400 in monthly receipts against an estimated $515 in monthly operating costs; receipts from the Chicago venue (located in a Masonic temple) were substantially lower, about $700 a month, though presumably operating costs were lower as well. For each machine, Edison's business at first generally charged $250 to the Kinetoscope Company and other distributors, which would use them in their own exhibition parlors or resell them to independent exhibitors; individual films were initially priced by Edison at $10. During the Kinetoscope's first eleven months of commercialization, the sale of viewing machines, films, and auxiliary items generated a profit of more than $85,000 for Edison's company.
One of the new firms to enter the field was the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company; the firm's partners, brothers Otway and Grey Latham, Otway's friend Enoch Rector
Enoch J. Rector (October 9, 1863 – January 26, 1957) was an American boxing film promoter and early cinema technician. He was a partner in Woodville Latham's Kinetoscope Exhibition Company (later the Lambda Company) during the mid-1890s, w ...
, and their employer, Samuel J. Tilden Jr., sought to combine the popularity of the Kinetoscope with that of prizefighting
Professional boxing, or prizefighting, is regulated, sanctioned boxing. Professional boxing bouts are fought for a purse that is divided between the boxers as determined by contract. Most professional bouts are supervised by a regulatory autho ...
. This led to a series of significant developments in the motion picture field: The Kinetograph was then capable of shooting only a 50-foot-long negative. At 16 frames per foot, this meant a maximum running time of 20 seconds at 40 frames per second (fps), the speed most frequently employed with the camera. At the rate of 30 fps that had been used as far back as 1891, a film could run for almost 27 seconds. Hendricks identifies ''Sandow'' as having been shot at 16 fps, as does the Library of Congress in its online catalog, where its duration is listed as 40 seconds. Even at the slowest of these rates, the running time would not have been enough to accommodate a satisfactory exchange of fisticuffs; 16 fps, as well, might have been thought to give too herky-jerky a visual effect for enjoyment of the sport. The Kinetograph and Kinetoscope were modified, possibly with Rector's assistance, so they could manage filmstrips three times longer than had previously been used.
On June 15, a match with abbreviated rounds was staged between boxers Michael Leonard and Jack Cushing at the Black Maria. Seven-hundred-and-fifty feet worth of images or even more were shot at the rate of 30 fps—easily the longest motion picture to date. Several weeks later, the film premiered at the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company's parlor at 83 Nassau Street in New York. A half-dozen expanded Kinetoscope machines each showed a different round of the fight for a dime, meaning 60 cents to see the complete bout. For a planned series of follow-up fights (of which the outcome of at least the first was fixed), the Lathams signed famous heavyweight James J. Corbett
James John "Jim" Corbett (September 1, 1866 – February 18, 1933) was an American professional boxer and a World Heavyweight Champion, best known as the only man who ever defeated the great John L. Sullivan (hence the " man who beat the man ...
, stipulating that his image could not be recorded by any other Kinetoscope company—the first movie star contract. In sum, seventy-five films were shot at the Edison facility in 1894.
Just three months after the commercial debut of the motion picture came the first recorded instance of motion picture censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
. The film in question showed a performance by the Spanish dancer Carmencita
Carmen Dauset Moreno, better known simply as Carmencita (1868 – 1910), was a Spanish-style dancer in American pre-vaudeville variety and music hall ballet.
Biography
Born in AlmerÃa, Andalusia, Spain, Carmencita took dancing lessons in Malag ...
, a New York music hall star since the beginning of the decade. According to one description of her live act, she "communicated an intense sexuality across the footlights that led male reporters to write long, exuberant columns about her performance"—articles that would later be reproduced in the Edison film catalog. The Kinetoscope movie of her dance, shot at the Black Maria in mid-March 1894, was playing in the New Jersey resort town Asbury Park by summer. The town's founder, James A. Bradley, a real estate developer and leading member of the Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's b ...
community, had recently been elected a state senator: "The ''Newark Evening News'' of 17 July 1894 reported that enatorBradley...was so shocked by the glimpse of Carmencita's ankles and lace that he complained to Mayor Ten Broeck. The showman was thereupon ordered to withdraw the offending film, which he replaced with ''Boxing Cats''." The following month, a San Francisco exhibitor was arrested for a Kinetoscope operation "alleged to be indecent." The group whose disgruntlement occasioned the arrest was the Pacific Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose targets included "illicit literature, obscene pictures and books, the sale of morphine, cocaine, opium, tobacco and liquors to minors, lottery tickets, etc.," and which proudly took credit for having "caused 70 arrests and obtained 48 convictions" in a recent two-month span.
The Kinetoscope was also gaining notice abroad. On July 16, 1894, it was demonstrated publicly for the first time in Europe at the 20 boulevard Montmartre newsroom of ''Le petit Parisienne'', where photographer Antoine Lumière may have seen it for the first time. In September, the first Kinetoscope parlor outside the United States opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The first European Kinetoscope parlor was soon operating in Paris, at 20 boulevard Poissonnière. One of the owners was a business associate of Antoine Lumière's, whom he gave a strip from ''Barber Shop'' and a request for cheaper alternatives to the expensive Edison-produced films he was showing. Along with the stir created by the Kinetoscope itself, thus was one of the primary inspirations for the Lumière brothers
Lumière is French for 'light'.
Lumiere, Lumière or Lumieres may refer to:
*Lumières, the philosophical movement in the Age of Enlightenment People
*Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers in film-making Film and TV
* Institut Lumière, a ...
, Antoine's sons, who would go on to develop not only improved motion picture cameras and film stock
Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed,
edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent p ...
but also the first commercially successful movie projection system. In mid-October, a Kinetoscope parlor opened in London. At the end of November, by which point New York City was host to half a dozen Kinetophone parlors and London to nearly as many, a venue with five machines opened in Sydney, Australia. By January 3, 25,000 filmgoers had paid the one-shilling fee (roughly equivalent to 25 cents, the same price for five film viewings as in the New York debut).
Dissemination of the system proceeded rapidly in Europe, as Edison had left his patents unprotected overseas. The most likely reason was the technology's reliance on a variety of foreign innovations and a consequent belief that patent applications would have little chance of success.[Braun (1992), pp. 190–91.] An alternative view, however, used to be popular: The 1971 edition of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica
The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various time ...
'', for instance, claims that Edison "apparently thought so little of his invention that he failed to pay the $150 that would have granted him an international copyright ." As recently as 2004, Andrew Rausch stated that Edison "balked at a $150 fee for overseas patents" and "saw little commercial value in the Kinetoscope." Given that Edison, as much a businessman as an inventor, spent approximately $24,000 on the system's development and went so far as to build a facility expressly for moviemaking before his U.S. patent was awarded, Rausch's interpretation is not widely shared by present-day scholars. Whatever the cause, two Greek entrepreneurs, George Georgiades and George Tragides, took advantage of the opening. Already successfully operating a pair of London movie parlors with Edison Kinetoscopes, they commissioned English inventor and manufacturer Robert W. Paul
Robert William Paul (3 October 1869 – 28 March 1943) was an English pioneer of film and scientific instrument maker.
He made narrative films as early as April 1895. Those films were shown first in Edison Kinetoscope knockoffs. In 1896 he s ...
to make copies of them. After fulfilling the Georgiades–Tragides contract, Paul decided to go into the movie business himself, proceeding to make dozens of additional Kinetoscope reproductions. In this pursuit, and to make films for both the original device and its knockoffs, Paul and photographer Birt Acres—briefly Paul's business partner—would originate a number of important innovations in both camera and exhibition technology. Meanwhile, plans were advancing at the Black Maria to realize Edison's goal of a motion picture system uniting image with sound.
The Kinetophone
The Kinetophone (aka Phonokinetoscope) was an early attempt by Edison and Dickson to create a sound-film system. The October 1893 ''Scientific American'' report on the Chicago World's Fair suggests that a Kinetograph camera accompanied by a cylinder phonograph was presented there as a demonstration of the potential to simultaneously record image and sound. The first known movie made as a test of the Kinetophone was shot at Edison's New Jersey studio in late 1894 or early 1895; now referred to as the Dickson Experimental Sound Film, it is the only surviving movie with live-recorded sound made for the Kinetophone. In March 1895, Edison offered the device for sale; involving no technological innovations, it was a Kinetoscope whose modified cabinet included an accompanying cylinder phonograph. Kinetoscope owners were also offered kits with which to retrofit their equipment. The first Kinetophone exhibitions appear to have taken place in April.
Though a Library of Congress educational website states, "The picture and sound were made somewhat synchronous by connecting the two with a belt", this is incorrect. As historian David Robinson describes, "The Kinetophone...made no attempt at synchronization. The viewer listened through tubes to a phonograph concealed in the cabinet and performing approximately appropriate music or other sound." Historian Douglas Gomery
Douglas Gomery is Resident Scholar at the Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland and Professor Emeritus at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park. He holds a doctorate in Communications ...
concurs, " disondid not try to synchronize sound and image." Leading production sound mixer Mark Ulano writes that Kinetophones "did ''not'' play synchronously other than the phonograph turned on when viewing and off when stopped." While the surviving Dickson test involves live-recorded sound, certainly most, and probably all, of the films marketed for the Kinetophone were shot as silents, predominantly march or dance subjects; exhibitors could then choose from a variety of musical cylinders offering a rhythmic match. For example, three different cylinders with orchestral performances were proposed as accompaniments for ''Carmencita'': "Valse Santiago", "La Paloma", and "Alma-Danza Spagnola".
Even as Edison followed his dream of securing the Kinetoscope's popularity by adding sound to its allure, many in the field were beginning to suspect that film projection was the next step that should be pursued. When Norman Raff communicated his customers' interest in such a system to Edison, he summarily rejected the notion:
No, if we make this screen machine that you are asking for, it will spoil everything. We are making these peep show machines and selling a lot of them at a good profit. If we put out a screen machine there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States. With that many screen machines you could show the pictures to everybody in the country—and then it would be done. Let's not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Under continuing pressure from Raff, Edison eventually conceded to investigate the possibility of developing a projection system. He seconded one of his lab's technicians to the Kinetoscope Company to initiate the work, without informing Dickson. Tensions between the latter and Edison Company general manager William Gilmore had been running high for months; Dickson's eventual discovery of the Kinetoscope Company move appears to have been another central factor in his break with Edison that occurred in April 1895. The Kinetophone's debut excited little demand; a total of just forty-five of the machines were built over the next half-decade. With Dickson's departure, Edison ceased new work on sound cinema for an extended period.
Projection wins out
On January 3, 1895, a British inventor received a patent for an unwieldy contraption meant to cast an enlarged Kinetoscope image onto a screen. Over the course of the year, even as new Kinetoscope exhibits opened as far afield as Mexico City, major cities across Europe, locales large and small around Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, it became evident that the system was going to lose out to projected motion pictures. In its second year of commercialization, the Kinetoscope operation's profits plummeted by more than 95 percent, to just over $4,000. The Latham brothers and their father, Woodville, had been developing a film projection system, retaining the services of former Edison employee Eugene Lauste
Eugène Augustin Lauste (17 January 1857 in Montmartre, France – 27 June 1935 in Montclair, New Jersey) was a French inventor instrumental in the technological development of the history of cinema.
By age 23 he held 53 French patents. He emigra ...
and benefiting secretly from Dickson's assistance while he was still in Edison's employ. A few weeks after he and Edison fell out, Dickson openly participated in an April 21 screening of the Latham group's new Eidoloscope
The Eidoloscope was an early motion picture system created by Eugene Augustin Lauste, Woodville Latham and his two sons through their business, the Lambda Company, in New York City in 1894 and 1895. The Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members ...
for at least one member of the New York press, which historians describe as the first public film projection in the U.S. On May 20, in Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan (also known as Downtown Manhattan or Downtown New York) is the southernmost part of Manhattan, the central borough for business, culture, and government in New York City, which is the most populated city in the United States with ...
, the world's first run of commercial motion picture screenings began: the Eidoloscope show's prime attraction was a boxing match between Young Griffo
Albert Griffiths (1 January 1871 – 10 December 1927), better known as Young Griffo, was a World Featherweight boxing champion from 1890 to 1892, and according to many sources, one of the first boxing world champions in any class. ''Ring'' ...
and Charles Barnett, approximately eight minutes long. European inventors, most prominently the Lumières and Germany's Skladanowsky brothers, were moving forward with similar systems. Another challenge came from a new "peep show" device, the cheap, flip-book-based Mutoscope—another venture to which Dickson had secretly contributed while working for Edison and to which he devoted himself following the Eidoloscope debut. Before year's end, the Mutoscope team, using their Mutograph camera as a basis, developed a projector. At that point, North American orders for new Kinetoscopes had all but evaporated.
By the beginning of 1896, Edison was turning his focus to the promotion of a projector technology, the Phantoscope, developed by young inventors Charles Francis Jenkins
Charles Francis Jenkins (August 22, 1867 – June 6, 1934) was an American engineer who was a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies. His businesses incl ...
and Thomas Armat. The rights to the system had been acquired by Raff and Gammon, who redubbed it the Vitascope
Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins' patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vi ...
and arranged with Edison to present himself as its creator. The Vitascope premiered in New York in April and met with swift success, but was just as quickly surpassed by the Cinématographe of the Lumières, which arrived in June with the backing of Benjamin F. Keith and his circuit of vaudeville theaters. The Eidoloscope's prospects, meanwhile, were crippled by projection deficiencies and business disputes. In September 1896, the Mutoscope Company's projector, the Biograph, was released; better funded than its competitors and with superior image quality, by the end of the year it was allied with Keith and soon dominated the North American projection market.
Departing the Vitascope operation after little more than a year—in which the Edison Company's film-related business made a $25,000 profit—Edison commissioned the development of his own projection systems, the Projectoscope and then multiple iterations of the Projecting Kinetoscope, eventually targeting semiprofessional and amateur customers. At its peak, around 1907–8, the Projecting Kinetoscope commanded 30 percent of US projector sales.[Lipton (2021), p. 157; Musser (1991), p. 474.] In 1912, Edison introduced the ambitious Home Projecting Kinetoscope, which employed a unique format of three parallel columns of sequential frames on one strip of film—the middle column ran through the machine in the reverse direction from its neighbors. It was a commercial failure. Three years later, the Edison operation came out with its last substantial new film exhibition technology, a short-lived theatrical system called the Super Kinetoscope. Aside from the actual Edison Studios
Edison Studios was an American film production organization, owned by companies controlled by inventor and entrepreneur, Thomas Edison. The studio made close to 1,200 films, as part of the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894–1911) and then Thom ...
film productions, the company's most creative work in the motion picture field from 1897 on involved the use of Kinetoscope-related patents in threatened or actual lawsuits for the purpose of financially pressuring or blocking commercial rivals.
As far back as some of the early Eidoloscope screenings, exhibitors had occasionally shown films accompanied by phonographs playing appropriate, though very roughly timed, sound effects; in the style of the Kinetophone described above, rhythmically matching recordings were also made available for march and dance subjects. While Edison oversaw cursory sound-cinema experiments after the success of '' The Great Train Robbery'' (1903) and other Edison Manufacturing Company productions, it was not until 1908 that he returned in earnest to the combined audiovisual concept that had first led him to enter the motion picture field. Edison patented a synchronization system connecting a projector and a phonograph, located behind the screen, via an assembly of three rigid shafts—a vertical one descending from each device, joined by a third running horizontally the entire length of the theater, beneath the floor. Two years later, he supervised a press demonstration at the laboratory of a sound-film system of either this or a later design.
In 1913, Edison finally introduced the new Kinetophone—like all of his sound-film exhibition systems since the first in the mid-1890s, it used a cylinder phonograph, now connected to a Projecting Kinetoscope via a fishing line–type belt and a series of metal pulleys. It met with early acclaim, but poorly trained operators had trouble keeping picture in synchronization with sound and, like other sound-film systems of the era, the Kinetophone had not solved the issues of insufficient amplification and unpleasant audio quality. Its drawing power as a novelty soon faded and when a fire at Edison's West Orange complex in December 1914 destroyed all of the company's Kinetophone image
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
and sound masters, the system was abandoned.[Altman (2004), pp. 175–78; Gomery (1985), pp. 54–55; Gomery (2005), pp. 28–29.]
File:Kinetoscope ad (Elmira - 1894).jpg, Advertisement for Kinetoscope exhibition in Elmira, New York
Elmira () is a city and the county seat of Chemung County, New York, United States. It is the principal city of the Elmira, New York, metropolitan statistical area, which encompasses Chemung County. The population was 26,523 at the 2020 cens ...
, September 1894
File:Ad for Thomas Edison's Kinetophone, 1913.jpeg, Promotion of Kinetophone system, January 1913
File:Kinétoscope et phonographe à cylindre de cire couplés.jpg, Reverse side of a Kinetophone, showing a wax cylinder phonograph driven by a belt
File:Optic Projection fig 221.jpg, Projecting Kinetoscope, 1914
See also
* William Friese-Greene
* List of film formats
* Motion Picture Patents Company
The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust), founded in December 1908 and terminated seven years later in 1915 after conflicts within the industry, was a trust of all the major US film companies and local foreign-bran ...
Notes
Sources
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* Appelbaum, Stanley (1980). ''The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record''. New York: Dover.
* Baldwin, Neil (2001 995
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* 3 June: Fujiwara no ...
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* Burns, Richard W. (1998). ''Television: An International History of the Formative Years''. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers.
* Christie, Ian (2019). ''Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema''. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
* Cross, Gary S., and John K. Walton (2005). ''The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century''. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Dickson W.K.L. (1907). "Edison's Kinematograph Experiments," in ''A History of Early Film'', vol. 1 (2000), ed. Stephen Herbert. London and New York: Routledge.
* Edison, Thomas A. (1891a). "Kinetographic Camera" in Mannoni et al., ''Light and Movement'', n.p.
* Edison, Thomas A. (1891b). "Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects" in Mannoni et al., ''Light and Movement'', n.p.
* Gomery, Douglas (1985). "The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry," in ''Technology and Culture—The Film Reader'' (2005), ed. Andrew Utterson, pp. 53–67. Oxford and New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
* Gomery, Douglas (2005). ''The Coming of Sound: A History''. New York and Oxon, UK: Routledge.
* Gosser, H. Mark (1977). ''Selected Attempts at Stereoscopic Moving Pictures and Their Relationship to the Development of Motion Picture Technology, 1852–1903''. New York: Arno Press.
* Grieveson, Lee, and Peter Krämer, eds. (2004). ''The Silent Cinema Reader''. London and New York: Routledge.
* Griffith, Richard, and Stanley William Reed (1971). "Motion Pictures," in ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 15th ed, vol. 15, pp. 898–918. Chicago et al.: Encyclopædia Britannica.
* ''Guida practica per l'uso...del kinetoscopio Edison'' (n.a.; 1895–96). Milan: Edita dall' "Elettricità ." Selected pages in Mannoni et al., ''Light and Movement'', n.p.
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* Mannoni, Laurent, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson (1996). ''Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420–1896/Luce e movimento: Incunaboli dell'immagine animata, 1420–1896''. London: BFI Publishing/Le Giornate Del CInema Muto, Cinémathèque française–Musée du Cinéma, Museo Nazionale del Cinema.
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* Münsterberg, Hugo (2004 916
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* Robinson, David (1996). " 'Carmencita'' description" in Mannoni et al., ''Light and Movement'', n.p.
* Robinson, David (1997). ''From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film''. New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.
* Rossell, Deac (1998). ''Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies''. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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* Spring – Otto III retakes Rome and restores power in the papal city. Crescenti ...
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Byzantine Empire
* Emperor Basil II uses his contingent of 6,000 Varangians to he ...
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External links
Edison Motion Picture Equipment Chronology
part of ''Professor Hall's Silent Movies''
illustrated survey of early cinematic equipment; part of ''Who's Who of Victorian Cinema''
Voice Trial—Kinetophone Actor Audition by Frank Lenord
mp3 audio file of undated audition; part of Project Gutenberg
Voice Trial—Kinetophone Actor Audition by Siegfried Von Schultz
mp3 audio file of undated audition; part of Project Gutenberg
Kinetoscope films
Library of Congress—Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies
twenty-five films from 1891 through 1895 (the dating of the "New York City street scene" to "1889 or 1890?" is impossible—no camera on earth capable of shooting a 16-foot-long motion picture existed at the time)
''Blacksmith Scene'' (aka ''Blacksmiths'', 1893)
part of The Henry Ford collection
''The Strong Man'' (aka ''Sandow'', 1894 [misdated as 1895])
for the first 14 seconds of the Library of Congress version, the image is reversed from this one—the Library's version splices at that point and the two versions are afterward aligned; part of The Henry Ford collection
''The Butterfly Dance'' (aka ''Anna Belle Butterfly Dance'', 1894/95)
part of The Henry Ford collection
''Anna Belle Serpentine Dance'' (1895)
hand-tinted version
{{Authority control
American inventions
Articles containing video clips
Audiovisual introductions in 1893
Film and video technology
Film sound production
History of film
Thomas Edison