11/15/22
Newletter159
The Crack of Dawn
I’m a big fan of Thomas Edison, who I believe is now severely misunderstood, and unfairly castigated. He seems to have developed the image of a mean, dominating man who tried to stop the progress of the film industry, and intentionally and maliciously crushed his competitors. If you ask, “What did Thomas Edison do?” The answer is: he was an inventor. Yes, that’s true, but he didn’t make money inventing things; he made money by selling them. Edison was a patent-holder and a manufacturer, and a big part of his business was enforcing his patents. Well, patents (and copyrights) are difficult things to enforce. If your invention is too simple, and too easy to copy, it will pretty quickly go into the public domain, then your patents become unenforceable and worthless. Therefore, you have to make as much money as you can as fast as you can before you lose exclusivity. And even in the 1800s this didn’t last long.
Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. It took a decade before he started to make any money at all, then in the next decade he went from being the king of the recording industry to becoming outdated because he sold Edison cylinder machines, and records became flat round platters. Edison eventually made those, too, but he had lost that market.
Movies came into existence in 1888-1889, and were fascinatingly invented at almost the exact same time by three different people: Louis Le Prince, William Friese-Greene, and Thomas Edison, in that order, though none of them knew of the other’s existence. Forgetting the fact that Louis Le Prince got on a train in 1890 and was never seen again (I own a book called The Missing Reel that absurdly purports that the villainous Edison had Le Prince killed), and Freise-Greene was a wedding photographer, so it was Edison who figured out how to make money with this invention.
In 1895 Edison came out with the Kinetoscope, a wooden box that you peered into that cost a nickel, and all movies were a minute long and depicted a single shot of a dancer or a weight-lifter or two cats boxing. Edison also produced and supplied all of the movies. For five years Edison was the king of motion pictures.
In France, Auguste and Louis Lumiere had the first screening of a movie with a projector (which they didn’t invent) and a screen in 1895. Now movies went off in a different direction.
Since all of these inventions are so mechanically simple that they can be constructed cheaply in a garage, the patents were almost impossible to enforce. Yes, Thomas Edison gave a good try by forming what was known as the Patent Trust, getting as many motion picture patents together as possible, then quickly found there was no way to enforce it. But he tried, and that’s where his bad rep comes from.
I have a fantasy. I think it’s incredible how four Jewish immigrant boys from Krasnosielc, Poland, living in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1900 got into the film business, and on some goofy level I would have liked to have been there (my grandfather was from Poland). They were Szmuel, Hirsz, Aaron and Jack Wonsal, who became Samuel, Harry, Albert and Jack Warner. They chipped in, bought a projector, a truck, and a couple of very early crude movies, and travelled around Ohio and Pennsylvania in a horse-drawn wagon, setting up anywhere they could, charging a nickel, and showing people their very first movies. Within five years they were theater owners, then started Warner Brothers, etc. But those first few years of travelling around in a wagon showing one-minute movies of fan dancers and musclemen flexing their biceps to farmers somehow seems magical and enchanting to me.
A good day to you.
The elephant had it coming.
Edison electrocuted an Elephant!!!