Made In America Read Free

charge of twenty-five cents, people lined up around the block for the chance to take a look at this marvellous new peep-show. 3 (The invention may have been new, but the word wasn’t; peep-show had first been used in 1861 in reference to kinematoscope viewers.) Projected through fifty-foot loops of film, each kinetophone show lasted no more than a minute and sometimes as little as sixteen seconds, with obvious consequent limitations on narrative possibilities. That the camera which recorded the moving images weighed 500 lb. and was the size of a modern refrigerator acted as a further deterrent to adventurous scenarios. As a result, the first kinetophone films consisted of simple amusements: quick vaudeville turns, pratfalls, dancing bears and – something of a surprise hit – a brief but lively feature called Fred Ott’s Sneeze (Fred Ott being an Edison employee), which has the distinction of being the first copyrighted motion picture.
    The shortcoming of the kinetoscope was that it could be viewed by only one person at a time. Unwilling or unable to see its potential, Edison failed to exploit his head start and was soon left behind in the hunt for a projection system that would allow motion pictures to become a shared experience. Rival systems began to sprout up everywhere, particularly in Europe where there were no copyright problems thanks to Edison’s miserly failure to secure a patent. In one of the moreintriguing developments, an inventor named Louis Aimé Augustin le Prince briefly excited Paris in 1890 by demonstrating a fully developed system in which moving film was projected on to a screen to the delight and astonishment of an invited audience. Shortly after this acclaimed performance, le Prince left his house on some errand and was never seen again. Another inventor in Paris, one Jean Leroy, thereupon demonstrated a rival system, again to great acclaim, and likewise mysteriously vanished. 4
    Not until 1895 did anyone else crack the problems of projecting film. Then in quick succession came three workable systems, all developed independently. One was the cinématographe, invented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. From this evolved both the French and British words for the movies as well as such terms as cinematography, cinematographer and, much later, Cinerama. The word occasionally appeared in America in the early days, though usually spelled kinema. In Germany, meanwhile, the brothers Max and Emile Skladanowsky developed their Bioskop, anglicized in America to Bioscope. And in England Robert Paul invented the Theatrograph or Animatographe, which was as technically sophisticated as the other two, but failed to prosper and soon dropped from contention.
    At last it dawned on Edison that there was money to be made in the film game. Unable to invent his own projection system, he did the next best thing. He bought one and claimed to have invented it. The system was in fact the invention of Thomas Armat. The only thing Edison invented was the name: Vitascope. Armat based his system on Edison’s kinetophone, but improved it substantially. One improvement was the addition of a small reel that gave the film another loop. Called the Latham loop after its American inventors, the brothers Otway and Greg Latham, it didn’t look much, but it transformed the history of the movies. Before the Latham loop, movies of more than a minute or sowere impossible because the film would so often break. The Latham loop eased the tension on the film and in doing so made it possible to create films of more than a hundred feet. For the first time real movies, with plots, were possible.
    The first public display of this new wonder was on 23 April 1896, as an added attraction between live shows at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway (a site now occupied by Macy’s). 5 Not having enough films of his own to show, Edison illegally copied some of the Lumière brothers’ early works. 6 Motion picture