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.
