Thursday 20 November 2014

Kinetoscope

The Beginning Of Film with Kinetoscope:
The earliest surviving motion picture is the two second experimental film, Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on October 1888 in Leeds, Yorkshire. This is noted by Guinness Book of Records. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Chief Engineer with the Edison Laboratories is credited with the invention of a celluloid strip containing a sequence of images. This formed the basis of photographing and projecting moving images. Celluloid blocks were thinly sliced and then removed with heated pressure plates. After this, they were coated with a photosensitive gelatine emulsion. This technique led to the invention of the Kinetograph and then the Kinetoscope.

In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Edison introduced them to the public. The Kinetoscope was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of Dickson’s celluloid film (powered by an electric motor) was lit by an incandescent lamp and seen through a magnifying lens.

Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets photographed by Dickson, in Edison’s Black Maria studio.



 These sequences recorded mundane events as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations. Kinetoscope parlours soon spread successfully to Europe. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene of everyday life, a public event, sports or slapstick.


References:
·         Appelbaum, Stanley (1980). The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record. New York: Dover. 
·          Baldwin, Neil (2001 [1995]). Edison: Inventing the Century. Chicago: University of Chicago 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.


This is how the Kinetoscope parlours looked like.