Developement of the Kinetoscope

An encounter with the work and ideas of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge appears to have spurred Edison to pursue the development of a motion picture system. On February 25, 1888, in Orange, New Jersey, Muybridge gave a lecture that may have included a demonstration of his zoopraxiscope, a device that projected sequential images drawn around the edge of a glass disc, producing the illusion of motion. The Edison facility was very close by, and the lecture was possibly attended by both Edison and his company's official photographer, William Dickson. Two days later, Muybridge and Edison met at Edison's laboratory in West Orange; Muybridge later described how he proposed a collaboration to join his device with the Edison phonographÐ'--a combination system that would play sound and images concurrently.[1] No such collaboration was undertaken, but in October 1888, Edison filed a preliminary claim, known as a caveat, with the U.S. Patent Office 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".[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] 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.[5] 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, it shows an employee of the lab in an apparently tongue-in-cheek display of physical dexterity.[6] Attempts at synchronizing sound were soon left behind, while Dickson would also experiment with disc-based exhibition designs.[7]

An acre in size, Edison's exhibit at the Exposition Universelle included an entire electrical power station. (Smithsonian Institution/William J. Hammer Collection)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.[8] During his two months abroad, Edison visited with scientist-photographer Ð"‰tienne-Jules Marey, who had devised a "chronophotographic gun"Ð'--the first portable motion picture cameraÐ'--which used a strip of flexible film designed to capture sequential images at twelve frames per second.[9] 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.[10] The first motion picture system to employ a perforated image band was apparently the ThÐ"©Ð"Ñžtre Optique, patented by French inventor Charles-Ð"‰mile Reynaud in 1888. Reynaud's system did not use photographic film, but images painted on gelatine frames.[11] At the Exposition Universelle, Edison would have seen both the ThÐ"©Ð"Ñžtre Optique and the electrical tachyscope of German inventor Ottamar AnschÐ"јtz.[12] This disc-based projection device 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.[13]

The question of when the Edison lab began working on a filmstrip device is a matter of historical debate. According to Dickson, in the summer of 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.[14] 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 [a camera] lens at considerable speed and under great tension without tearing...stimulat[ing] the almost immediate solution of the essential problems of cinematic invention.[15]

Charles Kayser of the Edison lab seated behind the Kinetograph. Portability was not among the camera's virtues.Some scholarsÐ'--in particular, Gordon Hendricks, in The Edison Motion Picture Myth (1961)Ð'--have argued that the lab began working on a filmstrip machine