The Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early device for exhibiting motion pictures.  It’s not a move projector though, it was designed so that you could view individually through a window that was housed in a cabinet, and its basic concept would eventually become the standard for future cinematic projection that is until the birth of video.  The Kinetoscope works by creating an illusion of movement from a strip of perforated film that has sequential images which run over a light source that has a high speed shutter.

Even though Thomas Edison is often credited as the inventor, it is now believed that is was largely developed mostly by one of his employees, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892.  He and a team of workers at the Edison lab are also created the Kinetograph, this was an camera that had rapid intermittent film movement, they used this for in house experiments and then went on to use if for commercial Kinetoscpe presentations.

The first showing of the Kinetoscope was not held at the Chicagos World’s Fair as it was originally scheduled, but actually at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on may 9th, 1893.  The first film publicly shown on the Kinetocope was called “Blacksmith Scene, aka Blacksmiths) it was directed by Dickson and was produced at the new Edison Studio, which was known as the Black Maria.  There is some debate over whether the Kinetscope actually made it to the fair, it’s documented that the no Kinetoscopes ever made it to the fair due largely to some extensive time off that Dickson had off due to a nervous breakdown.  However this seems to be proven by a leaflet issued in 1894 which promoted the launching of the Kinetoscope in London which did state “the Kinetoscope was not perfected in time for the great Fair”.  Whether it was or wasn’t  by 1894 the device was gaining lots of interest on the other side of the Atlantic and this was the inspiration for the Lumiere brothers, who went on to develop the first commercially successful movie projection system.

By October 17, 1894 the first Kinetoscope parlor opened in London, Edison had left his patents unprotected its believed that he balked at the $150 fee that would have granted him global copyright and so foreigners such as George Geogiades and George Tragides, two Greek entrepreneurs commissioned an English inventor to make copies of the Kinetocope.  The inventor, Robert W. Paul, after fulfilling that contract decided to enter the movie business himself and made dozens of reproductions of the Kinetoscope this resulted in many innovations.  The rest for the Kinetoscope, they say is history.