Today in History: August 31
Edison Patents the Kinetoscope
Edison Kinetoscopic Recording of a Sneeze,
copyright January 9, 1894.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress
View the film which was reconstructed from the paper print.
Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze
W.K.L. Dickson,
January 7, 1894.
Inventing Entertainment: The Edison Companies
On August 31, 1897, Thomas Edison received a patent for the kinetoscope, the forerunner of the motion-picture film projector. Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson had begun work on the project in hopes of boosting sales of the phonograph, which Edison had invented in1877, by enlivening sound recordings with moving pictures. Unable to synchronize the two media, he introduced the kinetoscope, a device for viewing moving pictures without sound.
By the 1897 patent date, however, both the camera (kinetograph) and the method of viewing films (kinetoscope) were on their way out. The late date for this patent was the result of appeals Edison had put into action several years earlier when other patent applications had been denied. Edison pursued getting the patent at this late date mainly so he might bring legal suit against his competitors and drive them out of business. This patent decision was highly controversial (other film companies called it fraud) and Edison used this patent as a means to eliminate rival competition.
The invention, which Edison initially considered an insignificant toy, had become an immediate success about a decade earlier. The kinetoscope was soon replaced, however, by screen projectors which made it possible for more than one person to view the novel silent movies at a time.
The Black Maria,
Edison's First Motion Picture Studio,
West Orange, New Jersey,
used between December 1892 and January 1901.
Inventing Entertainment: The Edison Companies
Edison and Dickson continued to experiment with motion pictures in the late 1880s and into the 1890s. Dickson designed the Black Maria, the first movie studio, which was completed in 1893. The name was derived from the slang for the police paddy wagons which the studio was said to resemble. Between 1893 and 1903, Edison produced between two and three hundred films at the Black Maria, including many of those found in the Edison Motion Pictures collection of the Library of Congress. Most of the films are short, as it was believed that people would not stand the "flickers" for more than ten minutes.
Turn-of-the-century copyright law provided protection for photographs but not for motion pictures. Therefore, a number of early producers protected their work by copyrighting paper contact prints of the film's individual frames. By the time the law was ammended in 1912, some 3500 such paper prints had been deposited for copyright registration. This practice proved fortuitous, as many early films have been lost due to disintegration and the high combustibility caused by early film's nitrate base. Many of these paper contact prints were converted back to film in the 1950s, and hundreds have been digitized in the 1990s.
Three Acrobats,
Thomas A. Edison, Inc.,
copyright March 20, 1899.
The American Variety Stage, 1870-1920
- View the motion pictures in the collection Inventing Entertainment: The Edison Companies. Also, see the motion pictures in the American Variety Stage, 1870-1920 collection. Included are films produced by Edison's company and films produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Edison's chief competitor.
- Search the Today in History Archive on invention for features on many inventors and the fruits of their imaginations and hard work. See, for instance, the features on Alexander Graham Bell's photophone and his telephone and the feature on Samuel Morse's telegraph.
- Browse the other American Memory motion picture collections such as:
