The motion picture made its commercial debut in 1895 and 1896, more or less simultaneously, in Paris, London, New York and elsewhere. That debut is duplicated occasionally at the present time when important Hollywood films have a number of simultaneous “world premieres.”

With the introduction of a satisfactory projector of life-size moving pictures which were not limited to a few seconds’ duration but could run for a number of minutes, the story of the origin of magic shadow entertainment comes to an end. From that day the phenomenal progress in entertainment and instruction of the motion picture is particularly history of that art-science. Magic shadow history is being written currently every evening on tens of thousands of screens before millions of spectators.

The motion picture projectors which finally were entirely successful and from which the history of the motion picture, properly speaking, arises were all principally based on Edison’s Kinetograph film peep-show which in 1894 was shown in New York, Paris and London.

In the Fall of 1894 Louis Lumière saw the Edison Kinetograph demonstrated at the Werner firm exhibit in Paris at 20 Boulevard Poissonière. From this he conceived the idea of combining such an apparatus with the Reynaud-type, which was already providing screen entertainment in Paris. Doubtless, Lumière was also familiar with Marey’s work.

Louis Lumière and his brother, Auguste, operated a photographic establishment at Lyons which their father had established. Lyons figured once before in the magic shadow show; it was here that Walgenstein, the Dane, first introduced Kircher’s magic lantern in France.

Lumière, who was a successful photographer, decided that the number of images used by Edison per second, forty-eight, was more than necessary so he used sixteen. Lumière, however, borrowed from Edison the idea of perforating the edge of the film, having one on each side of every frame instead of Edison’s four. Lumière adopted a claw type intermittent drive for the apparatus which was designed by an engineer, Charles Moissant. Léon Gaumont, who later became associated with Demeny, was Moissant’s secretary. The machine was constructed by the Jules Carpentier manufacturing firm.

First experiments were made with coated paper but this was found unsuitable. Celluloid was ordered from the American Celluloid Company and this the Lumières coated themselves because, unlike Edison, they were skilled in photography before they took up the motion picture problem. The Lumières were able to use celluloid but it was not as good as the Eastman motion picture film which Edison had found so satisfactory.

On February 13, 1895, the Lumières obtained a French patent on their camera-projector device, the Cinématographe. The name Cinématographe probably was derived from a French patent issued February 12, 1892, to Léon Bouly who had an idea for a camera which evidently was not reduced to practice.

Le Repas de Bébé, “The Baby’s Meal,” was the first Lumière film. Other scenes were made in the Lumière photographic plant, together with views of the city, including the Bourse. A demonstration of the apparatus was given there on March 22, 1895, but the Lumières were already established in business and in no haste to develop the new invention. The Cinématographe was shown at Marseilles in April, the month an English patent was obtained, and next shown at the Congress of the National Union of French Photographic Societies, held in June of the same year. There the Lumières created a sensation by filming the delegates arriving for the opening meeting on June 10, developing the film and showing it before the conference was adjourned on June 12. This was the first newsreel use of the motion picture.

On December 28th, the Lumières opened a commercial establishment for the Cinématographe in the Salle au Grand-Café at 14, Boulevard des Capucines. An admission charge of one franc was made, but only a few dozen curious people stopped in the first day. Soon however the fame of the Cinématographe spread throughout Paris. Within a few weeks the Lumière films were playing to “standing room only,” averaging more than two thousand admissions per day.

The Lumière Cinématographe was widely hailed. In his usual generous manner, Marey praised the accomplishment even though he must have been disappointed that others had achieved what he had long been seeking. The Cinématographe was shipped to England and the United States at an early date. In New York it was exhibited first in June, 1896, at Keith’s 14th Street Theatre, on Union Square. In both countries it was a stimulus to imitators. It continued to be one of the best projectors available for some time. The Lumière claw drive, however, was not as satisfactory as the Maltese-cross type used on some projectors from about 1870 and adopted by Edison for the camera, and it gradually yielded to the newer models.

The Lumières continued to maintain a lively interest in motion picture developments even after their success with the camera and projector. In 1897 they devised a safety condenser as a protection against the fire hazard; in 1898 a peep-show viewing model, and in 1903 they began a study of the possibilities of direct photographing of colors. This research led to a good color process which was later introduced commercially.

In England, Robert William Paul (1869–1943), scientific instrument-maker, who was the son of a London ship owner, was asked by George Georgiades and George Trajedis, two Greeks, to duplicate the Edison Kinetoscope. Georgiades and Trajedis had bought Kinetoscopes in New York from Holland Bros., eastern agents of the first Kinetoscope Company and brought them to London where they were exhibited in October, 1894, at a store in Old Broad Street. Paul inspected the Kinetoscope and knew he could copy it. But he did not believe he was free to do so, feeling sure that Edison had already patented the machine in England. Investigation showed that no such action had been taken. Thereupon at his work shop in Hatton Garden, London, Paul made Kinetoscopes for the two Greek exhibitors and also for himself. With his own machines he opened a display at Earl’s Court, London. Soon Paul began work on a camera and projector based on the Kinetoscope peep-show device.

Paul had become interested in creating a machine which would take the spectators into the past or future after reading a fantastic tale of H. G. Wells called The Time Machine, published in 1894. Paul and Wells talked the matter over, the one a designer and inventor, the other a successful writer gifted with an extravagant imagination. A British patent was applied for but no model or apparatus was ever devised because the money for such an undertaking was not found. The Paul-Wells Time Machine was to be an elaborate affair. Spectators were to be seated on platforms which would move about; adding to the illusion, magic lanterns and motion picture projectors were to flash pictures on all sides. It was another application of the old Phantasmagoria idea to achieve effects by moving the projectors—and in this case, the audience also. Similar effects are achieved with much less trouble, both for the showman and the spectator, in the modern story motion picture.

In the Spring of 1895, Paul made an agreement with Birt Acres by which Acres would make films with a camera constructed by Paul. Previously Paul had been using Edison films but the supply was cut off. His camera was much smaller and more portable than the Edison model. Acres claimed that he had started work on a motion picture camera as far back as 1889 but the effort had not been very successful. By the end of 1893 Acres said he had developed a camera which used one lens or a battery of twelve (Uchatius fashion) and had devoted himself to improving the apparatus instead of “seeking a bubble reputation as a music hall showman,” as he himself put it. In 1897 when he had correspondence with Wordsworth Donisthorpe over the latter’s early work in motion pictures, Acres was not happy about his motion picture associations, for he said: “Every Tom, Dick and Harry is now claiming to be the inventor and first exhibitor of these animated photographs and I can fully sympathize with Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inasmuch as some one else has obtained credit for his invention. My own experience with various adventurers is not unique.”

Paul’s first camera design had an intermittent movement featuring a clamping and unclamping action which was rather hard on the celluloid film made by the Hyatt brothers in Newark, N. J., imported to England and coated for photographic use by the Blair Company. Shortly thereafter, Paul changed to an intermittent movement having a seven-point Maltese Cross. This was an important development.

Paul’s projector, called the Animatograph, had its first showing at the Finsbury Technical College on February 20, 1896. Eight days later it was demonstrated at the Royal Institute. Its success came to the attention of a theatreman, Sir Augustus Harris, operator of the Olympia Theatre. A deal was made by Harris with Paul and the projector rechristened the “Theatrograph.” After a short but successful run at the Olympia in London, the device was booked for two weeks at the Alhambra, Leicester Square. This motion picture show stayed there four years.

Subjects projected at twenty pictures per second by the Paul device in the early programs were: “A Rough Sea at Dover,” a hand colored film; “Bootblack at Work in a London Street,” sporting events and many other scenes.

Acres and Paul filmed the Derby of 1896, making some of the first successful topical pictures. Scenes showing the Prince of Wales’ horse, Persimmon, winning the Derby were exhibited at the Alhambra the evening after the race, creating a sensation and numerous curtain calls for Paul. The public was amazed.

Paul continued to be interested in motion pictures, especially their scientific aspects, as a kind of hobby, for about 15 years. However, in 1912 he destroyed practically all his films and gave no further attention to the cinema. In addition to his early work in projection and camera design Paul himself had filmed many pictures including a series of animated drawings, à la Walt Disney, to show electrical phenomena resulting from the approach of two magnets. These scientific films were made in association with Professor Silvanus Thompson. Paul also produced a number of comedies and used trick camera work to show motor cars flying to the moon and other bizarre effects. During World War I Paul invented secret war apparatus including an anti-aircraft height finder and anti-submarine device.

Charles Pathé, a great name in the early French film world and carried on by several companies in the United States and elsewhere, bought one of the first Paul motion picture projectors. Previously he had roadshowed the Edison phonograph.

Acres had a projector of his own called the Kinetic Lantern, which he said was finished in January, 1896, but the title was changed to Kineopticon and later to Cinematoscope for a special program for the Prince of Wales. Probably this projector also was made by Paul or he assisted in its design. Acres, however, was primarily interested in his profession of photography, and motion pictures appeared to him to be only one aspect of the subject. In 1897 he said: “There is something in photography and, in particular, in animated photography. Indeed, I think there can be no doubt that animated photography is destined to revolutionize our art-science, both as regards matters historical and scientific, in addition to giving us life-long portraits.”

By the time Acres thus spoke the revolution was well under way.

As in France, a number of men immediately started making cameras and projectors in England. The patent rights were confused, chiefly because Edison neglected to secure foreign coverage, leaving the field wide open.

In the United States two factors dominated the experimentation: (1) the Anschütz Electrical Tachyscope, shown at the Chicago Fair in 1893 and (2) the Edison peep-show film device on display in many places, starting in New York in the Spring of 1894.

The projection of life-size motion pictures on a screen before an audience might have been achieved considerably earlier had Edison not felt that there would be no commercial market for such a device. The little peep-show models could be manufactured at rather low cost and sold at a profit, so no impetus was given to the development of a screen projector which might, he thought, quickly dissipate the public’s interest and destroy the market. But, it may be recalled, the screen projector, combined with the talking phonograph, had been Edison’s original goal when he started the experiments in 1887.

One of the men who was impressed by Anschütz’s Electrical Tachyscope at the Chicago Fair was a young Virginian, Thomas Armat. He was a man of means and though associated in a real estate office in Washington, D. C., still had time to follow his scientific interests which induced him to attend the Bliss School of Electricity in Washington. At this time, Armat had already invented a conduit for an electric railway and had refused an offer to interest himself in the distribution of the Edison peep-show film Kinetoscope. He wanted screen projection.

At the Bliss School Armat was introduced to C. Francis Jenkins, a young Government clerk, who also was interested in scientific matters. He had studied the Edison Kinetoscope and, for the Pure Food Show in Convention Hall, in November of 1894, had shown a model which instead of Edison’s revolving shutter had revolving electric lights, based on the Uchatius idea. In March of 1894 Jenkins received a patent on a motion picture camera which used a revolving lens system called the Phantoscope. There is no evidence that Jenkins ever made that camera operate efficiently. It was described in the Photographic Times of July, 1894, as being only five by five by eight inches in size and weighing ten pounds. Pictures of an athlete in action, said to have been taken with Jenkins’ device were reproduced.

Jenkins was having difficulty achieving projection. Armat and he decided to form a partnership. Armat was to build a projector after Jenkins’ design and, in return, he would receive rights to the rotating lens camera patent. The results were a failure. Armat decided to continue with his own ideas and there was no objection, as he was supplying the money and the place for the work in the basement of his real estate office at 1313 “F” Street, in Washington.

Armat decided that the Jenkins idea of continuous movement with revolving lights was unworkable and chose an intermittent action. A variation of the Maltese-cross gear system was tried. The eventual legal dispute between Armat and Jenkins has obscured data on the system first used. It is certain the results were not wholly successful.

Three of these machines were built in the Summer of 1895 and the first showing was held at the Cotton States Exposition at Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-September. There the chief picture competition was the inspiration—the Anschütz Electrical Tachyscope. There was also an extensive display of the Edison peep-show machines. Armat must have been glad to see the Edison activity because it was from that source that he was getting his film for the projector.

The projector at the Cotton States Exposition was not well received. The show finally burned up in a fire that swept the area. Fifteen hundred dollars was borrowed from Armat’s brothers to continue activities. Jenkins went home to Richmond, Indiana, for his brother’s wedding, taking one of the projectors with him.

Meanwhile, Armat hit upon a loop to ease the strain of projection. Jenkins gave a demonstration of the projector on October 29, 1895, and by November 22nd, Armat and Jenkins had disagreed. Jenkins tried to patent some modification on his own, without his partner, but found that he was in interference with the Armat-Jenkins projector patent and signed a concession of priority. From his invention Armat made a great profit which was obtained not without many law suits. Later Jenkins produced a non-intermittent projector of clever but impractical design. He also contributed some original ideas to television development but again the results were not very practical.

Certain other attempts were made to achieve projection of the magic shadows and complete the motion picture system at this time. Most of them also were stimulated by the exhibition of Anschütz’s Electrical Tachyscope. One of these was made by Rudolph Melville Hunter (1856–1935), a consulting engineer and inventor of considerable prominence in America. In 1883 Hunter had suggested a Dover-Calais tunnel, something that might have made the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 much easier; the year before, 1882, he had suggested torpedo boats; later he devised smokeless powder for the French Government and sold some 300 patents to the General Electric and Westinghouse companies. He was also a consultant on acoustics. In his biography, last printed in the 1920–21 edition of Who’s Who (at which time he evidently retired), Hunter asserted that he “designed and built the first motion picture projector in the world in 1894.” His show, scheduled for Atlantic City, never opened. No details are known of his projector.

In the Summer of 1894, two gay young men, Grey and Otway Latham, drug company salesmen operating out of New York, became concessionaires for the Kinetoscope and formed the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company. That firm’s chief purpose was to photograph and exhibit prize-fight films. In September of 1894 the young Lathams decided that there never would be much to the peep-show motion picture business and determined to try to get life-size pictures on the screen. They called upon their father, Major Woodville Latham, for assistance.

Major Latham had had a distinguished career as an ordnance officer of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. For a time he was professor of chemistry at the University of West Virginia.

In December, 1894, the Lathams formed the Lambda Company—the Greek “L” for Latham—and a start was made in their quest for a motion picture projector. Dickson was in on the deal although he was still working for Edison. Eugène Lauste, a somewhat secretive friend of Dickson, who was born in Paris in 1857 and had come to the United States in 1887, was the mechanic who worked in Latham’s shop. Lauste previously had been employed by Edison.

By the end of the Winter of 1894–95 the Latham project was showing signs of success. A demonstration was held on April 21, 1895, at 35 Frankford Street, New York City and on May 20, 1895, a public showing opened in a small store at 153 Broadway. The Latham projector was found to be inadequate and the following comments were made in the Photographic Times for September, 1895: “Even in this, the latest device, there is considerable room for improvement and many drawbacks have yet to be overcome.” Specific objections were made to the grain of the film, the fact that it was not entirely transparent, and other factors. It was noted that Major Latham was “persevering” in efforts to improve the device. But some word of encouragement was given: “Even in the present state the results obtained are most interesting and often startling. Quite a crowd of people visit the store at each performance, many making their exit wondering ‘How it’s done’.” It is worth noting that no illustration of the Latham machine was given but instead the Reynaud Optical Theatre of Paris was shown. Latham’s projector was called the Pantoptikon and later the Eidoloscope. Latham indignantly denied that parts of his device were borrowed from Edison’s machines. It is likely the Major was not aware of all that went on in his work shop.

Dickson eventually joined an organization called the KMCD syndicate, for E. B. Koopman of the Magic Introduction Company; Henry Norton Marvin, a former Edison Associate; Herman Casler, the actual inventor of a camera designed to evade Edison methods, and Dickson. The Casler camera or Mutograph, and the peep-show viewer or Mutoscope, sought to evade the Edison patents, so everything that Edison had they tried to avoid. The Mutoscope in its simplest form was really a step backwards to the old Thaumatrope principle of flashing successive card views before the eye. The Casler camera used unperforated wide gauge film with the pictures irregularly spaced. This made no difference, for the pictures were each mounted on cards.

The Mutoscope and the Mutograph stimulated interest and competition in films, and was the father of the concern around which opposition to Edison centered. The “independents” relied on the American Mutoscope Company, or Biograph as it became, to supply films which would be outside the restriction of the Edison patents. The ensuing patent war was long and bitter but did not materially interfere with the development of the motion picture.

Meanwhile, Edison’s agents, Raff & Gammon, were becoming important. The sale of the peep-show Kinetoscopes was only serving to increase the demand for projection and it was feared that the imitators of Edison, such as Lumière, Paul and Latham and others would control the field. Edison, however, was not able—for lack of time or other reasons—to meet the demands of his film agents with perfection enough to satisfy himself. His researches continued but his agents and the public were impatient.

Gammon, of the Raff & Gammon firm, decided to investigate the Armat projector which he had heard about in Washington. A five or six minute show was given on December 8, 1895, by Armat in the basement of his real estate office. In January of 1896 a deal was made whereby Edison would manufacture the projector and it would be introduced under his name, but as “Armat designed.” The agents wanted, of course, to play up the name of Edison for commercial reasons. Edison was induced to accept this arrangement by his general manager W. E. Gilmore—who, incidentally, had discharged Dickson.

A demonstration of the Armat-Edison projector was held on April 3 and on April 23, 1896, the Vitascope, as it was called, made its debut at the Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on Herald Square, 34th Street, New York City. This was a banner day in the history of the screen. The many hesitant and uncertain steps down through the centuries quickened into an assured march of progress. The public reaction to the Vitascope was excellent, although the programs presented were crude and immature. For several years to come the films offered were only short items which found their chief use as audience “chasers,” run as the final number in vaudeville shows. (Illustration facing page 161.)

The New York Herald reported on May 3, 1896, that the subjects would soon be lengthened from 50 feet to 150 feet and 500 feet. “Gone With the Wind,” the mammoth of 1941, was 20,000 feet long. New attractions promised in the first days were to include Niagara Falls, which Langenheim had photographed with marked success a half-century earlier; a steamer going down the Lachine Rapids, and an ocean liner leaving its dock.

The Herald said: “The result is intensely interesting and pleasing but Mr. Edison is not quite satisfied yet. He wants now to improve the phonograph so that it will record double the amount of sound it does at present, and he hopes then to combine this improved phonograph with the Vitascope so as to make it possible for an audience to witness a photographic reproduction of an opera or a play—to see the movements of the actors and hear their voices as plainly as though they were witnessing the original production itself.”

The “world premiere” newspaper review concluded: “And when it is remembered what marvels Edison has produced, it would not seem at all improbable that he may yet add this one to his many others.”

The talking picture, however, did not make its real debut for three decades.

The New York Tribune on Sunday, May 3, 1896, said: “Edison’s Vitascope has made a decided hit at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall. Tomorrow evening all the pictures will be in colors. The Vitascope, together with Albert Chevalier, is drawing large audiences.”

Raff & Gammon now had something that could be sold easily; the Vitascope was everywhere well received. Eighty projectors of the Armat design were delivered by the Edison company from April to November of 1896. And Edison started renewed work on his own “Projecting Kinetoscope,” independently of Armat.

An advertising brochure for the Vitascope told the story this way:

On the last page of the advertising brochure for the Vitascope it was asserted that the rights were controlled for the world. If that had been true the Edison firm would have reaped an incalculable fortune. But by this time many projection machines and cameras by diverse manufacturers were coming into use in many countries.

Magic shadows—living reproductions of people and the world—at last had reached the screen.

But there still remained a long and important step to be taken in order that the true fidelity of living pictures could be achieved. Sound needed to be added to sight. So again, thirty years later, magic shadow history was made—this time at the Winter Garden theatre in New York City, on October 6, 1927. The event was the premiere of “The Jazz Singer,” starring Al Jolson and presenting the Vitaphone system of talking motion pictures. This rounding out of the faculties of magic shadows came through the enterprise of the Warner brothers—Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack—and the technological achievements of Dr. Lee DeForest, Theodore Case, Charles A. Hoxie and the others who gave the screen its voice.

Generally, the motion picture industry was skeptical of talking motion pictures and their future. But soon public opinion registered emphatically and the addition of sound was accepted as an indispensable faculty of the medium of the screen. And now finally the ancient and persevering urge for true living pictures was satisfied.

And thus the motion picture, like many another achievement of the human heart and hand and mind, has come down to us as the result of incalculable effort on the part of many. This great benefaction to humanity the world over is the realization of the aspirations of many who labored unceasingly and well down through the centuries—Archimedes, Aristotle, Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Porta, Athanasius Kircher, Musschenbroek, Paris, Plateau, Uchatius, Langenheim, Marey, Muybridge, Edison and others. It is the creation of men of many centuries and many nations and from these diversities of time and persons it has gained its amazing power, its universal appeal.

THE END