Film History Before 1920
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Innovations Necessary for the Advent of Cinema:
Optical toys, shadow shows, 'magic lanterns,' and visual            tricks have existed for thousands of years. Many inventors, scientists,           and manufacturers  have observed the visual phenomenon           that a series of individual still pictures set into motion created           the illusion of movement - a concept termed persistence of vision.           This illusion  of motion was first described by British physician Peter           Mark Roget in  1824, and was a first step in the development of the           cinema.
A number of technologies, simple optical toys and mechanical inventions related to motion            and vision were developed in the early to late 19th century that were            precursors to the birth of the motion picture industry:
[A very early version of a "magic lantern" was suggested in the mid-17th century by German Jesuit priest                   Athanasius Kircher in Rome. However, the official inventor                   of a usable device was  prominent Dutch astronomer/scientist                    Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s. Like a modern slide projector                   (which has since gone out of date!), its main feature was a                   lens that projected images from transparencies onto a screen,                   with a simple light source (such as a candle).]
1824 - the invention of the Thaumatrope (the              earliest version of an optical illusion toy that exploited the concept          of "persistence of vision" first presented by Peter Mark Roget in a scholarly article) by an English doctor named Dr. John Ayrton Paris
ca. 1826 or 1827 - the oldest  recorded               (and surviving)  permanent photograph made in a camera was taken               by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He used               a camera obscura device  which captured and projected a               scene illuminated by sunlight. The photo image was "shot" at his               estate named Le Gras from his studio's upstairs window in the Burgundy               region of France in the early 1820s. It               was a very rudimentary photograph (using principles of lithography)               - the image is now known as View               from the Window at Le Gras. His invention was called heliography,               or "light                writing."
1831 - the discovery of the law of electromagnetic              induction by English scientist Michael Faraday, a principle used              in generating electricity and powering motors and other machines (including              film equipment)
1832 - the invention of the Fantascope (also              called Phenakistiscope or "spindle viewer") by Belgian              inventor Joseph Plateau, a device that simulated motion. A series or              sequence of separate pictures depicting stages of an activity, such              as juggling or dancing, were arranged around the perimeter or edges              of a slotted disk. When the disk was placed before a mirror and spun              or rotated, a
spectator              looking through the slots 'perceived' a moving picture.
1834 - the invention and patenting of another stroboscopic device adaptation, the Daedalum (renamed the Zoetrope in 1867 by American William Lincoln) by British inventor William George              Horner. It was a hollow, rotating drum/cylinder with a crank, with a              strip of sequential photographs, drawings, paintings or illustrations on the interior surface and regularly              spaced narrow slits through which a spectator observed the 'moving' drawings.
1839 - the birth of still photography with the development                of the first commercially-viable daguerreotype (a method                of capturing  still images on silvered, copper-metal plates) by                French painter and  inventor Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, following                on the work of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
1841 - the patenting of calotype (or Talbotype,              a process for printing negative photographs on high-quality paper) by              British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot
1861 - the invention of the Kinematoscope, patented by Philadelphian Coleman Sellers, an improved rotating paddle machine to view (by hand-cranking) a series of stereoscopic still pictures on glass plates that were sequentially mounted in a cabinet-box
1869 - the development of celluloid by John              Wesley Hyatt, patented in 1870 and trademarked in 1873 - later used              as the base for photographic film
1870 - the first demonstration of the Phasmotrope (or Phasmatrope) by Henry Renno Heyl in Philadelphia, that showed a rapid succession of still or posed photographs of dancers, giving the illusion of  motion
1877 - the invention of the Praxinoscope by              French inventor Charles Emile Reynaud - it was a 'projector' device              with a mirrored drum that created the illusion of movement with picture              strips, a refined version of the Zoetrope with mirrors at the center              of the drum instead of slots; public demonstrations of the Praxinoscope              were made by the early 1890s with screenings of 15 minute 'movies' at              his Parisian Theatre Optique
1879 - Thomas Alva Edison's first public exhibition              of an efficient incandescent light bulb, later used for film projectors
Late 19th Century Inventions and Experiments: Muybridge, Marey, Le        Prince and Eastman
Pioneering          Britisher Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), an early photographer and inventor,          was famous for his photographic loco-motion studies (of animals and humans)          at the end of the 19th century (such as 1882's published "The Horse in Motion").          In the 1870s, Muybridge experimented with instantaneously recording the movements of a galloping horse, first at a Sacramento (California) race track. In June, 1878, he  successfully conducted a 'chronophotography' experiment          in Palo Alto (California) for his wealthy San Francisco benefactor, Leland Stanford, using a multiple series of cameras          to record a horse's gallops - this conclusively proved that all four of the horse's feet were off the ground at the same time.
Muybridge's pictures, published widely in the late 1800s, were often              cut into strips and used in a Praxinoscope, a descendant of the zoetrope device, invented by Charles Emile Reynaud in 1877. The              Praxinoscope was the first 'movie machine' that could project a              series of images onto a screen. Muybridge's stop-action series of photographs              helped lead to his own 1879 invention of the Zoopraxiscope (or "zoogyroscope", also called the "wheel of life"), a primitive motion-picture projector machine              that also recreated the illusion of movement (or animation) by projecting              images - rapidly displayed in succession - onto a screen from photos printed              on a rotating glass disc.
True motion pictures, rather than eye-fooling 'animations', could only          occur after the development of film (flexible and transparent celluloid)          that could record split-second pictures. Some of the first experiments          in this regard were conducted by Parisian innovator and physiologist Etienne-Jules          Marey in the 1880s. He was also studying, experimenting, and recording          bodies (most often of flying animals, such as pelicans in flight) in motion using photographic means (and French astronomer Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen's "revolving photographic plate" idea).
In 1882, Marey, often            claimed to be the 'inventor of cinema,' constructed a camera (or "photographic gun") that could take multiple (12) photographs per second of moving            animals or humans - called chronophotography or serial photography, similar to Muybridge's work on taking multiple exposed images of running horses. [The term shooting              a film was possibly derived from Marey's invention.] He was able to            record multiple images of a subject's movement on the same camera plate,            rather than the individual images Muybridge had produced.
Marey's chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of sensitized paper - celluloid film - that passed              automatically through a camera of his own design) were revolutionary.              He was soon able to achieve a frame rate of 30 images. Further experimentation              was conducted by French-born Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince in 1888. Le              Prince used long rolls of paper covered with photographic emulsion for              a camera that he devised and patented. Two short fragments survive of              his early motion picture film (one of which was titled Traffic Crossing                Leeds Bridge).
The work of Muybridge, Marey and Le Prince laid the groundwork for the                development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid                film - hence the development of cinema. American inventor George Eastman, who had first manufactured photographic dry plates in 1878,                provided a more stable type of celluloid film with his concurrent developments                in 1888 of sensitized paper roll photographic film (instead of glass plates) and a                convenient "Kodak" small box camera (a still camera) that used                the roll film. He improved upon the paper roll film with another invention                in 1889 - perforated celluloid (synthetic plastic material coated                with gelatin) roll-film with photographic emulsion.
The Birth of US Cinema:                  Thomas Edison and William K.L. Dickson
In the late 1880s, famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)                    (and his young British assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860-1935))                    in his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, borrowed from the earlier                    work of Muybridge, Marey, Le Prince and Eastman. Their goal was to construct                    a device for recording movement on film, and another device for viewing                    the film. Dickson must be credited with most of the creative and innovative                    developments - Edison only provided the research program and his laboratories                    for the revolutionary work.
Although Edison is often credited with the          development of early motion picture cameras and projectors, it was Dickson,           in November 1890, who devised a crude, motor-powered camera that could           photograph motion pictures - called a Kinetograph. This was one of the major reasons          for the emergence of motion pictures in the 1890s. Edison Studios was formally known as the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894-1911), with innovations due largely to the work of Edison's assistant Dickson in the mid-1890s.
The motor-driven camera was designed to capture movement with a synchronized              shutter and sprocket system (Dickson's unique invention) that could move              the film through the camera by an electric motor. The Kinetograph used              film which was 35mm wide and had sprocket holes to advance the film. The sprocket system would momentarily pause the film roll before the camera's              shutter to create a photographic frame (a still or photographic             image).
In 1889 or 1890, Dickson filmed his first experimental           Kinetoscope trial or test film, Monkeyshines No. 1 (1889/1890),           the only surviving film from the cylinder kinetoscope, and apparently           the first motion           picture ever produced on photographic film in the United States. It           featured the movement of laboratory assistant Sacco Albanese, filmed       with a system using tiny images that rotated around the cylinder.
Dickson         Greeting (1891), apparently the second film made in the US, was          composed of  test footage of William K.L. Dickson himself, bowing, smiling         and ceremoniously taking off his hat. It was a three-second clip.  It         was used for one of the first public demonstrations         of motion pictures in the US using the Kinetoscope, presented to the         Federation of Women's Clubs.
In         1891, Dickson also designed an early version of a movie-picture projector         (an optical lantern viewing machine) based on the Zoetrope - called         the Kinetoscope. Dickson         and Edison also built a vertical-feed motion picture camera in the summer         of 1892.
The formal introduction of the Kinetograph in October           of 1892 set the standard for theatrical motion picture cameras still           used today.  It used a film strip that was 1 1/2 inches wide.           This established the basis for today's standard 35 mm commercial film           gauge, occurring in 1897. The 35 mm width with 4 perforations per frame           became accepted as the international standard gauge in 1909. However, moveable hand-cranked cameras soon became more           popular, because the motor-driven cameras were heavy and bulky.
On Saturday, April 14, 1894, a refined version of Edison's           Kinetoscope began commercial operation. The floor-standing, box-like           viewing device was basically a bulky, coin-operated,  movie "peep           show" cabinet for a single customer (in which the              images on a continuous film loop-belt were viewed in motion as they           were  rotated in front of a shutter and an electric lamp-light). The           Kinetoscope,  the forerunner of the motion picture film projector (without           sound), was  finally patented on August 31, 1897 (Edison applied for           the patent in  1891, granted in 1893). The viewing device quickly became           popular in carnivals, Kinetoscope parlors, amusement arcades, and sideshows           for a number of years.
The           world's first film production studio - or "America's first           movie studio," the Black Maria,                or the Kinetographic Theater (and dubbed "The Doghouse" by               Edison himself), was built on the grounds of Edison's laboratories                at West Orange, New Jersey. Construction         began in December 1892,  and it was completed by  February 1, 1893,         at a cost of $637.67. It was constructed for the purpose of making film               strips for the Kinetoscope. It was a black, tar-paper covered building/studio               (with a retractable or hinged, flip-up roof to allow sunlight in),               and built with a turntable to orient itself throughout the day               to follow the natural sunlight.
Thomas           Edison displayed 'his' Kinetoscope projector at the World's Columbian           Exhibition in Chicago and received patents for his movie camera, the Kinetograph,           and his electrically-driven peepshow device - the Kinetoscope.           In early May, 1893, Edison also held the world's first public exhibition           or demonstration of films at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.           The exhibited 34-second film, Blacksmith           Scene (1893), was viewed on Dickson's Kinetoscope viewer, and           was shot using a Kinetograph at the Black Maria. It showed       three people pretending to be blacksmiths.
The           first motion pictures made in the Black Maria were deposited for  copyright           by Dickson at the Library of Congress in August, 1893. On January 7,            1894, The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (aka Fred            Ott's Sneeze (1894)) became the first film officially            registered for copyright. It was one of the first series of short            films made by Dickson for the Kinetoscope viewer in Edison's Black            Maria studio with fellow assistant Fred Ott.            The short five-second film was made for publicity purposes, as a series            of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly.             It was the earliest surviving, copyrighted motion picture            (or "flicker")                      - composed of an optical record (and medium close-up) of            Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing comically for the camera. It was noted as the first medium-closeup.
A short film (about 21 seconds long) titled Carmencita             (1894) was directed and produced by Edison's employee William             K.L. Dickson. She was filmed March 10-16, 1894 in Edison's Black             Maria studio in West Orange, NJ. Spanish dancer Carmencita was the             first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera,             and quite possibly the first female to appear in a US motion picture.             In some cases, the projection of the scandalous film on a Kinetoscope             was forbidden, because it revealed Carmencita's legs and undergarments             as she twirled and danced. This was one of the earliest cases of       censorship in the moving picture industry.
Most of the first films shot at the Black Maria included segments of magic shows, plays,          vaudeville performances (with dancers and strongmen), acts from Buffalo          Bill's Wild West Show, various boxing matches and cockfights, and scantily-clad          women. Most of the earliest moving images, however, were non-fictional,          unedited, crude documentary, "home movie" views of ordinary          slices of life - street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or          shots of a passing train. [Footnote: the 'Black Maria' studio appeared          in Universal's comedy Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops (1955).]
In the early 1890s, Edison and Dickson also devised a prototype sound-film system called the Kinetophonograph or Kinetophone -           a precursor of the 1891 Kinetoscope with a cylinder-playing phonograph           (and connected earphone tubes) to provide the unsynchronized sound.           The projector was connected to the phonograph with a pulley system,           but it didn't work very well and was difficult to synchronize. It was           formally introduced in 1895, but soon proved to be unsuccessful since           competitive, better synchronized devices were also beginning to appear           at the time. The first known (and only surviving) film with live-recorded           sound made to test the Kinetophone was the 17-second Dickson Experimental           Sound Film (1894-1895).
Kinetoscope Parlors and Films Flourish:
On April         14, 1894, the Holland Brothers opened the first Kinetoscope Parlor         at 1155 Broadway in New York City and for the first time,         they commercially exhibited  movies, as we know them today, in their         amusement arcade. Each         film cost 5 cents to view. Patrons paid  25 cents as the admission charge         to view films in five kinetoscope machines placed in two rows. The         first commercial presentation of a motion picture took place here.         The mostly male audience was entertained by a single loop reel depicting         clothed female dancers, sparring boxers and body builders, animal acts         and everyday scenes. Early spectators in Kinetoscope           parlors were amazed by even the most mundane moving images in very           short films (between 30 and 60 seconds) - an approaching train or a           parade, women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats, and twisting contortionists.
Soon, peep show Kinetoscope parlors quickly opened         across the country, set up in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, and         phonograph parlors in major cities across the US. One         of the companies formed to market Edison's Kinetoscopes and the films         was called the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company. It was owned by         Otway Latham, Grey Latham, Samuel Tilden, and Enoch Rector. In the summer         of 1894 in downtown New York City (at 83 Nassau St.), it set up a series         of large-capacity Kinetoscopes (able to handle up to 150 feet of film),         each one showing one, one–minute round of the           six round Michael Leonard-Jack Cushing Prize Fight (1894) film           (produced and filmed at Edison's Black Maria studio). Each viewing           cost 10 cents, or 60 cents to see the entire fight. The popular boxing           film was the first boxing film produced for commercial exhibition.
In June of 1894, pioneering inventor           Charles Francis Jenkins became the first person to project a filmed           motion picture onto a screen for an audience, in Richmond, Indiana,           using his projector termed the Phantoscope. The motion picture           was of a vaudeville dancer doing a butterfly dance - the first motion           picture with color (tinted frame by frame, by hand). Some of the earliest color hand-tinted films ever publically-released were Annabelle           Butterfly Dance (1894), Annabelle Sun Dance (1894), and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) featuring the dancing of vaudeville-music           hall performer Annabelle Whitford (known as Peerless Annabelle) Moore,           whose routines were filmed at Edison's studio in New Jersey. Male audiences           were enthralled watching these early depictions of a clothed female           dancer (sometimes color-tinted) on a Kinetoscope - an early peep-show           device for projecting short films.
Young         Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett (1895) was the first 'movie'         or motion picture in the world to be screened for a paying audience on         May 20, 1895, at a storefront at 156 Broadway in NYC. [This was more         than seven months before the Lumière brothers showed their film         in Paris (see below).] The 8-minute         B&W         silent film (shown on one continuous           reel of film without interruption, using the "Latham Loop" to           prevent tearing) was made by Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and           Grey. The staged boxing match had been filmed with an Eidoloscope Camera           on the roof of Madison Square Garden on May 4, 1895 between Australian           boxer Albert Griffiths (Young Griffo) and Charles Barnett. Shortly           thereafter, nearly 500 people became cinema's first major audience           during the showings of films with titles such as Barber Shop, Blacksmiths, Cock         Fight, Wrestling,         and Trapeze. Edison's         film  studio was used to supply films for this sensational new form         of entertainment.  More Kinetoscope parlors soon opened in other         cities (San Francisco, Atlantic  City, and Chicago).
The Kiss (1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss) was           the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history.           May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted a lingering kiss for Thomas Edison's           film camera in this 20-second long short, from their 1895 Broadway           stage play-musical The Widow Jones. It became the most popular           film produced that year by Edison's film company (it was filmed at           Edison's Black Maria studio, in West Orange, NJ), but was also notorious           as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and bringing demands       for censorship.
The American Mutoscope Company: Dickson's Split From         Edison
Disgruntled and a disenchanted inventor, William K.L.           Dickson left Edison to form his own company in 1895, called the American           Mutoscope Company (see more further below), the first and           the oldest movie company in America. A nickelodeon film producer who           had been working with Thomas Edison for a number of years, Dickson           left following a disagreement. Three others joined Dickson, inventors           Herman Casler and Henry Marvin, and an investor named Elias Koopman.           The company was set up at 841 Broadway, in New York - its sole focus           was to produce and distribute moving pictures. The business was moved           to Canastota, NY. Superior alternatives to the Kinetoscope were         the company's invention of the Mutoscope -         a hand-cranked viewing device utilizing bromide prints or illustrated         cards in a 'flick-book' principle, and the Biograph projector, released         in the summer of 1896 - a projector using large-format, wide-gauge 68         mm film (different from Edison's 35mm). The Biograph soon         became the chief US competitor to Edison's Kinetoscope and Vitascope.         [Note: The American Mutoscope Company eventually became the Biograph           Company.] [By the 1897 patent             date of the Kinetoscope, both the camera (kinetograph) and the method             of viewing films (kinetoscope) were on the decline with the advent         of more modern screen projectors for larger audiences.]
Film History of the Pre-1920s