Success did not come quickly. Edison traveled to Europe in 1889, leaving Dickson in charge of perfecting the motion picture apparatus. On Edison's return in October, Dickson claims to have greeted his boss with a projected film on a screen, roughly synchronized with sound. Dickson called the machine the Kinetophonograph. Unfortunately, no evidence other than Dickson's claim exists for this amazingly early synchronization of projection and sound. The earliest pieces of existing film can be traced to no earlier than 1890, and the earliest whole film on record at the Library of Congress is Fred Ott's Sneeze, which a contemporary magazine article describes as being shot in 1891. According to legend, one of Edison's mechanics, Fred Ott, was a very comical fellow. Dickson selected Fred as the subject for one of his first strips on celluloid. Of course, Fred froze in front of the camera for the first few takes, but he eventually sneezed his comical sneeze and the first celluloid close-up was in the can.
The problem now confronting Dickson was how to share that sneeze with the public. Edison, worried about the poor reproduction of the projected images, decided on direct viewing. Rather than seeing an image projected for large groups, the individual customer would put an eye to the hole of a machine and view a single filmstrip inside it. Edison's decision was based partly on his integrity as an inventor and partly on his greed as a businessman. He saw the greater clarity of reproduction in the little peephole machine; and he was sure he would make more money from the novelty if it were displayed to one person at a time rather than a hall full of people who would quickly tire of a silly novelty. Edison so underestimated the potential of moving pictures that he refused to spend $150 to extend his American patent rights to England and Europe. His shortsightedness would prove expensive.
In 1891, Edison applied for patents on his camera, the Kinetograph, and his peephole viewer, the Kinetoscope. Slowness of manufacture and distribution retarded the popularity of the invention, but within three or four years Kinetoscope Parlors, showing Fred's sneeze and other items, had sprung up all over the United States. Rows of Kinetoscope machines beckoned the customer to peek at the new marvel of . mechanically recorded life.
The requirements and design of this Kinetoscope machine strongly influenced the films that Dickson shot for them. Wound around spools inside the Kinetoscope, the film's ending led continuously into its beginning, exactly as the Phenakistiscope wheels or Zootrope strips had done. The space inside the Kinetoscope box limited the length of a filmstrip to fifty feet, and since Edison's cameras and viewers ran at forty frames per second, the Kinetoscope contained less than a half-minute of action. The films for these machines were not edited; whatever Dickson shot became the finished film. The films had no storied, just a simple bit of action or movement. The most popular filmstrips were bits of dancing, juggling, or clowning, of natural wonders from all over the world, and even of staged historical events. Despite the crudeness of the first Edison Films梐nd despite his blunder abou t projection--?Edison left his mark on the future of film. His most important contribution was the decision to use perforations on the side of the film to help it roll smoothly past the shutter. The Edison-Dickson perforations quickly became the standard throughout the world and were known as the American Perforation. Edison was also the father of the movie studio. In order to produce filmstrips for the Kinetoscope Parlors, Dickson built a small room especially for motion pictures adjacent to the Edison laboratories. Because the outside of the studio was protected with black tar-paper, the room quickly became known as the Black Maria, at that time slang for paddy wagon. Dickson mounted his camera on a trolley inside the Black Maria so that it could move closer or further away, depending on the subject of the film. The . camera, however, never changed position during the shooting. To light the action, the Black Maria's roof opened to catch the sunlight. The whole studio could be rotated to catch the sun, so that the scene would always be sufficiently lit.
The disadvantages of the Black Maria are obvious. The room was really a small sunlit theatre with the camera as single spectator. There was even a specified stage area where the juggler, dancer, comic, or animal performed. Mobility was further curtailed by the bulky heaviness of Dickson's camera and by Edison's insistence on using electricity rather than a hand crank to run it, so that the machine remained perpetually indoors and inert.
Freeing the camera from its cage and freeing the filmstrip from its peephole box were the final steps in the evolution of the movie machine. For these steps the history of film travels back across the Atlantic.
The problem of projecting motion pictures was surprisingly difficult to solve. After the principles of motion photography had been discovered and a camera developed to demonstrate the principles, one would have thought that projecting the images would come easily. In fact, early projection attempts produced blurry images, ripped film, and a great deal of noise. Edison's decision to shelve projection was as much a realization of difficulties as a business blunder. On the other hand, it should have been clear to Edison, as it was to other invent ors, that a projected motion picture was the next evolutionary step. For hundreds of years audiences had delighted in mechanically projected shows. Even before photography, audiences had sat in darkened rooms and watched projected images on a screen.
The invention of the magic lantern is attributed to Father Athanasius Kircher, who, in 1646, made drawings of a box that could reproduce images by means of a light passing through a lens. That box was the ancestor of today's slide projector. In the eighteenth century, showmen trooped across Europe giving magiclantern shows, projecting drawings and, much later, photographs for paying customers. From the beginning, the magic lanternists sought to make their static images move. They developed lantern slides with moving parts and moving patterns. They used multiple lanterns to give the impression of depth and sequence. The most famous of these multiple-lantern shows was the Phantasmagoria, in which ghosts and spirits were made to move, appear, and disappear with the aid of moving lanterns and mirrors. The stroboscopic toys of the nineteenth century further enlarged the lanternist's bag of motion tricks.
The last in this string of premovie projection entertainments was the movie's closest ancestor, the photo play. In the late nineteenth century, Alexander Black, an American author and lecturer, combined the magic-lantern slide, photography, and narrative to produce a complete play with live narrator, live actors, and pictorial slides. Unlike the stroboscopic lantern shows, the goal of these entertainments was not the visual novelty of reproduced motion but the realization of the same stories and dramas that drew audiences to the live theatre. Some of these photo plays lasted a full two hours and contained as many as four slides a minute. A striking connection between the photo play and the early movies is that both used the same melodramatic plots and stereotyped characters.
Such predecessors clearly indicated the potential popularity of projected movie shows. The problem was to develop a machine that could project the filmstrips. There were two specific difficulties, which Edison himself had faced and forgotten: the projector needed a powerful enough light source to make the projected image clear and distinct, and the film needed to run smoothly and regularly past that light source without ripping, rattling, or burning. One of the first successful projections was made by a Virginia family of adventurer-inventors, the Lathams. Major Woodville Latham, former officer in the Confederate Army and former chemistry instructor, together with his two dashing sons, Gray and Otway, invented a camera and projecting machine in 1895 (called either the Panoptikon or the Eidoloscope) that produced better results than Edison's. The Lathams doubled the size of Edison's film to approximately 70mm. The bigger film produced a clearer, brighter, sharper picture. Although the Lathams gave a few showings in southern cities and in New York, their stay in the big city converted the two Latham boys from scientists to playboys. The Lathams and their invention ended in the obscurity of financial disaster.
A successful projector had to do more than just enlarge the film. It required a totally new principle of moving the film past the gate. The new principle, discovered and developed in Europe rather than America, used an intermittent movement of the film rather than a continuous one. Each frame stopped momentarily in front of the lamp and was then succeeded by the next frame, which stopped, and then the next, which stopped, and so forth. The intermittent movement allowed a clear, sharp image, for the stationary frame used the available light more economically. The intermittent motion was, in principle, precisely the same as the slits in the Phenakistiscope; rather than a continuous succession of whirring images, each image was separated from the others into an individual piece of the whole. The intermittent movement solved the problem of ripping film as well as of insufficient illumination. The moments of pause allowed the tension on the take-up reel to ease; the film did not rip as it did with continuous-motion projectors. The single problem caused by intermittent motion was the possibility of burning the film that remained momentarily stationary in the gate. To solve this problem, the intermittent-motion projector required some kind of cooling system to protect the film. Today, despite all the changes and improvements in movie equipment, our projectors are the same in principle as those invented in the final years of the nineteenth century.
As early as 1888, a Frenchman working in England, Louis Augustin Le Prince, patented machines that both shot and projected motion pictures, using intermittent motion in both processes. He also shot several filmstrips with a machine that used perforated film and a much slower film speed than Edison's (twenty frames per second). Le Prince's influence on the history of film is minor, however, for in 1890 he mysteriously disappeared from a train between Dijon and Paris; he was never found. In 1893, an Englishman, William Friese-Greene, patented a combination camera-projector.
Because the same machine that shot the films also projected them, and because cameras had always used intermittent motion, intermittent motion for projection was guaranteed by the use of the identical mechanism. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that this early machine ever successfully photographed or projected any films. The two most significant projectors were developed by men who began, ironically, by buying Edison Kinetographs and analyzing them. Edison's oversight in neglecting European rights allowed an Englishman, R. W. Paul, and, more important, two Frenchmen, appropriately named Lumifere, to invent a functional projector and build a more functional camera.
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, the elder, and Louis Jean Lumiere, the younger and more important of the two inventor brothers, started dabbling with Edison's Kinetoscope and Kinetograph in 1894. Their father, an avid photographer, had founded a factory in Lyon for manufacturing photographic plates and, later, celluloid film. Interested by the new motion photography, these scientist-industrialist-mechanic brothers developed their own machine within a year. Unlike Edison's bulky indoor camera, the Lumifere camera was portable; it could be carried anywhere. The operator turned a hand crank rather than pushed an electric button. In addition, like the invention of Friese- Greene, the same machine that shot the pictures also printed and projected them. While the machine admitted light through its lens during filming, it projected light through its lens during projection. Intermittent motion was guaranteed for projection.
Early in 1895 the Lumiere brothers shot their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. Beginning in March of the same year, the Lumieres showed this film and several others to private, specially invited audiences of scientists and friends throughout Europe. The first movie theatre was opened to the paying public on December 28, 1895, in the basement room of the Grand Cafe in Paris. The Lumi~res showed several films, among them Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, a Lumiere baby's meal (Le Repas de bebe), a comical incident of a gardener getting his faced doused by a boy's prank (L'Arroseur arrosee), and a train rushing into a railway station (L'Arrive d'un train en gare). The last Film provoked the most reaction, as the audience shrieked and ducked when it saw the train hurtling toward them. In Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers -- Godard's films are filled with historical tidbits -- farm boy watches his first movie, which is also a train arriving at a station, using the same camera angle as Lumieres'. The boy shrieks and ducks, just as the first movie audiences did in the cafe theatre. Audiences would have to learn how to watch movies. (They do not have to learn, but the filmmakers have to learn.)
The Lumiere discovery of 1895 established the brothers as the most influential and important men in motion pictures in the world, eclipsing the power and prestige of Edison's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope. Within five years, the light of the Lumieres would also fade. The brothers were more interested in the scientific curiosity of their discovery than the art or business of it, although eventually their film catalogue included over one thousand filmstrips for purchase. The Lumieres sent the first camera crews all over the globe, recording the most interesting scenes and cities of the earth for the delight and instruction of a public who would never be able to travel to such places on their own. Despite their brief importance, the Lumiere discoveries established several patterns and practices that have remained standard throughout the history of film. The Lumieres set the film width at 35mm, still a standard width of film today. The Lumi~res established the film speed of sixteen frames per second, the approximate standard speed until the invention of sound required a faster one for better sound reproduction. The slower film speed allowed their projector to run more quietly and dependably. Edison, maintaining the visual superiority of forty frames per second, scoffed that the Lumiere speed would destroy the sensation of continuous movement; only a year later Edison himself adopted the Lumiere speed. And a final Lumiere contribution was the fancy name they coined for their invention梩he CinCmatographe it is one of the few Greco-Latin names to survive the first era of invention. In many countries today, as well as in the columns of many sophisticated film reviewers, the movies are the cinema.
Almost simultaneously with the Lumikes, experimenters in England, Germany, and America were making progress on their own machines. In England, R. W. Paul and Birt Acres also borrowed Edison's unpatented machines as a basis for their own discoveries. In Berlin, Max and Emil Skladanowsky entertained audiences with their Bioscope, a camera and projector they had developed independently of any other invention. In America, a young inventor named Thomas Armat independently discovered the Lumiere principle that the film movement must be intermittent. In addition, Armat discovered that the film ran more smoothly with a small loop to relax the film tension just before and behind the film gate. This loop was quickly adopted around the world and called the American or "Latham" loop, which all projectors still use today. The loop also proved the legal loophole that Edison dragged into the courts for the next ten years in an attempt to get back the money he had lost from his initial mistake. But the story of the lawsuits comes later. Early-in 1896, Thomas Armat and Thomas Edison came to a business agreement. Edison would sell Armat's projector as his own invention, enhancing the prestige and sales potentia of the machine. Armat would silently receive a handsome percentage of the sales. The Edison company announced it; latest invention, the Vitascope, a projecting version of the "Wizard's" Kinetoscope.
The first public showing of a projected motion picture in the United States is difficult to fix. The Lathams projected films in a store in 1895. Thomas Armat demonstrated his projector in Richmond, Virginia, before selling it to Edison. Several other American inventors -- Jean-AimC ie Roy, Eugene Lauste, Herman Casler, Francis Jenkins?also demonstrated projection machines to limited audiences. But the first official public showing for a paying adience was on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, on 34th Street and Broadway in New York City, the present site of Macy's. The "amazing Vitascope" was only one act in a vaudeville bill; movies were typically part of vaudeville shows in the United States until they started filling their own theatres shortly after the turn of the century.
For the first Vitascope program, Edison converted several of his Kinetoscope strips for the projector; he also pirated a few of the R. W. Paul films from England. One good piracy deserved another. As with Lumieres' first showings, the most exciting films were those with action that came straight out at the audience. During the showing of a filmstrip of The Beach at Dover patrons in the front rows ran screaming from their seats, afraid they were about to be drenched. Those cynics who were unimpressed were sure that the film had been shot in New Jersey.
The first film audiences were amazed to see that living, moving action could be projected on an inert screen by an inanimate machine. The first Films merely exploited their amazement. The films that Louis Lumiere shot for his Cintmatographe and that Dickson and others shot for the Vitascope were similar. A film lasted between fifteen and ninety seconds. The camera was stationed in a single spot, turned on to record the action, and then turned off when the action had finished. These films were really "home movies" -- unedited scenery, family activity, or posed action -- that depended for their effect on the same source as today's home movies -- the wonder of seeing something familia r and transitory reproduced in an unfamiliar and permanent way. Nowhere is the home-movie-like quality of the first films more obvious than in Lumiers' Le Repas de bebe, which has been duplicated uncounted times in later 8mm versions. A major difference between the first Edison films and the first Lumiere films is that Lumieres' have more of this home-movie quality of merely turning the camera on to record the events that happened to occur around it. The Edison films, despite their lack of editing and plot, were gropings toward a fictional, theatrical film; they were indoor films. The Lumiere films took advantage of the outdoors. They were freer, less stilted, better composed, more active.
The categories of the Lumieres' catalogue indicate their conception of what the filmstrip would provide its audience. The catalogue breaks its filmstrips into different kinds of "views"梞ere visual actualities桮eneral Views, Com ic Views, Military Views, Views of Diverse Countries. The most interesting views are those containing the most interesting patterns of movement: a boat struggling out to sea against the waves, a cavalryman mounting and dismounting from his horse in the accepted military style, the charge of a line of cavalry horses, the crumbling of a demolished wall.
The most celebrated of the Lumiere films is the comic jest, L'Arroseur arrosse. This incident, staged, but shot outdoors, contains the seeds of what was to blossom into one of the most important contributions of the silent film -- physical comedy. While a gardener waters a lawn, a boy sneaks behind him and steps on the hose. Seeing the hose is dry, the gardener picks up the nozzle and stares at it. The boy steps off the hose; water gushes out of the nozzle into the gardener's unsuspecting face. The boy laughs. The gardener catches the boy and spanks him (although the camera's refusal to pan with the action makes the final action more difficult to catch than the boy).
This little film contains many elements of a comic art that would one day mature: the gag is completely physical; despite the improbability of the result, the causes are clear and credible; the butt of the joke is unjustly and unwittingly the victim of circumstances of which he is unaware; despite the victim's ignorance, the audience participates in the joke with the boy; the comic punishment is more a blow to the ego than to the body; the comic participants have obvious one- dimensional traits and roles so that complexity of character cannot interfere with the force of the jest.
The early Edison films lack the freshness and freedom of Lumi~res' failing to understand and exploit the wonder and beaUty of watching the world at work and at play, at rest and in motion. Typical is the staged heaviness of The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895). In less than a half-minute of film, besheeted guards lead Mary to the block, push her on it, and whack off her head. The audience then gets the thrill of seeing Mary's head bound off like a basketball. Despite the clumsiness of the film, two elements of it are worth some attention. First, the camera clearly thinks of itself as a spectator in the theatre. The characters move left and right in a single plane, rather than using the full depth that films were later to discover. Further, the film has a strong sense of entrance and exit, two more stage devices the mature film would discard. This stage mentality would continue to dominate the movies for over fifteen years. Second, the film shows one clear realization of the potential of the film medium. After Mary sets her head on the block, the camera stops to allow a dummy head to substitute for Mary's real one. The ability to stop the action and start it again is one of the advantages that the camera enjoys over the stage. Within a very few years, the Frenchman, Georges MCli~s, would make much out of this camera advantage.
A second interesting Edison film, and certainly the most famous, is the John Rice -May lrwin Kiss. Shot originally for the Kinetoscope in 1896, this kiss, .when projected on the large screen, excited the first wave of moralistic reaction to movie romance, which has remained a constant in film history. John Rice and May lrwin were the romantic leads in a current Broadway stage success; Edison got them to enact their climactic kiss in his Black Maria. When moralists and reformers saw their large, projected mouths meet in lascivious embrace, they showered the local newspapers with letters and the local politicians with petitions. Upon seeing The Kiss today, the viewer would probably find more obscenity in the dumpy unattractiveness of the two bussers than in their "torrid" kiss, which seems a quarter- second peck. The players spend more time coyly and clumsily puckering up than they do in physical contact.
Although Lumiere specialized in . actualities and Edison in theatrical and staged scenes, the success of each in his particular genre led to imitations by the other. Edison's Washday Troubles (1898) is a clear descendant of Lumieres' gardener film, as a tub of washing douses those who are tending-it because of a boy's prank. After seeing Edison's success with historical scenes, Lumiere began staging those such as Marat and Robespierre in 1897. In addition to borrowing successful formulas -- practice that would continue throughout movie history and even into today's television programming -- he two companies literally stole each other's films, made up duplicate prints (dupes), and sold them as their own. In addition to competing with and stealing from each other, Edison and Lumiere faced both competition and thievery from rivals who were springing up in England, America, and France. The next ten years of film history would be a decade of commercial lawlessness as well as aesthetic discovery.