The Invention of Cinematography
The cinema was invented in the 1890s, during the industrial revolution.
On June 19, 1872, under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The experiment took place on June 11 at the Palo Alto farm in California.
Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on October 14, 1888 in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK is now known as the earliest surviving motion picture.
On June 21, 1889, William Friese-Greene was issued patent no. 10131 for his 'chronophotographic' camera. It was apparently capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film.
In 1891 W. K. L. Dickson, working under the direction of Thomas Edison, designed a fully capable camera called the Kinetograph. It took a series of instantaneous photographs on standard Eastman Kodak photographic emulsion coated on to a transparent celluloid strip 35 mm wide. In 1893 a single person viewing box called the Kinetoscope was first shown to the public for viewing of the motion pictures.
A form of a celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images was invented at the Edison labs.
On April 14, 1894 at the first Kinetoscope parlor ever built, the first commercial for profit film was available to the public, one viewer at a time.
In June 1894 the first audience viewable motion picture projector was demonstrated by Charles Francis Jenkins, and it was called the Phantoscope. Other forms of the projector were being invented around the same time. Later, 35-mm wide Edison film, and the 16-frames-per-second projection speed of the Lumière Cinématographe became standard.
In 1896 the Edison company decided there was more money in showing motion picture films with a projector to a large audience. They duplicated the “Phantoscope”, renamed it the Vitascope and used it to show 480 mm. width films being made by their company to audiences.
In 1897, Robert W. Paul had the first real rotating camera head made to put on a tripod, so that he could follow the passing processions of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot.
Real film continuity, which means showing action moving from one shot into another joined to it, can be dated to Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898. In the first shot of this film, an old couple outside an art exhibition follow other people inside through the door. The second shot showed what they do inside.
By 1898 France was active in film making with both the Lumière company and Georges Méliès. Méliès is famous for having the first special effects and producing the first Science Fiction film, A Trip to the Moon in 1902.
Commercially more successful than the Edison Company was a former employee using his Mutoscope and later his Biograph projector.
From 1895 to 1906 motion pictures show the cinema moving from a novelty to an established large-scale entertainment industry. The films represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, completely made by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots.
Louis Le Prince
Le Prince is considered by many film historians as the true father of motion pictures. Le Prince filmed moving picture sequences Roundhay Garden Scene and a Leeds Bridge street scene using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper film in the year 1888, prior to other competing inventors.
On September 16, 1890 Louis Le Prince mysteriously disappeared either prior to or after boarding a train for Paris. The train arrived, with no trace of Le Prince. His suspicious disappearance allowed Thomas Edison to take the credit for the invention of motion pictures.
At the time that he vanished, Le Prince was about to patent his 1889 projector in the UK and then leave Europe for his scheduled New York official exhibition. He would have made the first public exhibition before Edison and thus received the credit. Le Prince's widow put forth the idea that Edison had motive for having Le Prince disappear. By ordering Le Prince's assassination, this allowed for Edison to take the lead as the inventor of cinematography.
Two years after testifying as a witness against Thomas Edison in a patient lawsuit for the American Mutoscope Company, Louis Le Prince's son Adolphe Le Prince also died in a suspicious way. Adolphe Le Prince was found dead while out duck shooting on Fire Island near New York.
Video Documentaries
- Edison - The Invention of the Movies: 1891-1918
- A Trip To The Moon & The Extraordinary Voyage
- Landmarks of Early Film
- D.W. Griffith: Years of Discovery
- D.W. Griffith: The Father of Film
- Melies the Magician
- BBC Four - Paul Merton's Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema
