Moving Picture Machines
Part one - The Kinetoscope
Thomas Edison demonstrated his first Phonograph in 1877; a device for the
recording and playback of sound. A decade later, he turned his attentions to the
development of the recording and playback of moving images. But it was Edison's
assistant who was to be the true pioneer of coin-operated moving pictures.
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was born in France in 1860. His father was English
and his mother, although French, was of Scottish decent. After the death of his father,
William Dickson, with his mother and two sisters, moved to England. At the age of
nineteen, he wrote to Edison asking for employment, to which Edison refused . The
Dickson family's stay in England was brief, and they soon moved to America, where
four years later Dickson was finally offered employment at the Edison laboratories.
Experiments on a moving picture machine began in 1888, when Edison
determined to develop "an instrument which does for the eye what the Phonograph has
done for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion." It was
Dickson who was given the job of developing Edison's ideas, and it is he who is
generally credited as the major player in the development of moving pictures. Early
experiments centred around the Phonograph principal, using a cylinder around which
tiny photographic transparencies were attached in a spiral, in much the same way as the
groove spirals round a Phonograph cylinder. It was intended that images would be
projected by shining a light through the transparencies from inside the cylinder.
Edison also clearly intended to combine vision with sound, as is evidenced in his
preliminary patent claim in October 1888, where he stated: "We may see and hear a
whole Opera as perfe ctly as if actually present." Edison's second patent claim was
filed in March 1889, where Edison named the new device as a Kinetoscope (from the
Greek kin eto, meaning movement and skopos to watch). But there were still many
problems to overcome, in particular it seems, creating either an intermittent light source
or intermittent movement of the cylinder between each image in order to momentarily
freeze each individual frame. Unable to overcome these difficulties, the cylinder idea
was eventually abandoned toward the end of 1890.
The major breakthrough for Dickson came in the summer of 1889, with the
introduction of photographic quality celluloid, and efforts were concentrated on
developing a machine using celluloid film. Essentially, the new Kinetoscope employed
a continuous loop of film wound around spools driven by an electric motor, housed in a
wooden case. An eyepiece was located at the top of the box, through which the film
could be viewed through a magnifying lens. Light was shone through the film from
inside the case via a rotating shutter mechanism, which intercepted the light source in
sync with the passage of the film, thus producing the illusion of motion.
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