4/3/23
Newsletter #295
The Crack of Dawn
[When I said that I’d be in Barcelona today, what I actually meant was tomorrow].
Here is how movies came to be: In 1824 British Dr. Peter Mark Roget presented a paper to the Royal Society of Medicine entitled, The Persistence of Vision. In this paper he explained how images remain burned onto the retina of the eye for one-sixteenth of a second. This is the physiological reason that movies work. In 1852 Dr. Roget published a thesaurus that has remained in print for over 170 years.
Between 1878 and 1886 a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge conducted many experiments of capturing the phases of movement in still photographs. This culminated in 1878 in his famous series of twelve still shots of a racehorse running, thus proving it had all four feet off the ground for a split-second.
Then in 1888 movies were so eager to be born that they were invented by three different people in the same year. The first was a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, who lived in England. He had already built two prototype movie cameras, and received the very first patent on a motion picture camera for his second camera. This camera had four rows of four lenses each, with sixteen shutters that went off in sequence, photographing one second of action. It was an absurd system, but it worked. Le Prince included an addendum to his patent about the single-lens camera he was building. Le Prince did build a single-lens camera and on Oct. 18, 1888, photographed the very first movie, Roundhay Garden Scene. On Sept. 16, 1890 Louis Le Prince boarded a train for Paris with his new camera, and was never seen again.
In 1888 in W. Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison was also working on movies, as well as many other things, primarily phonographs — Edison Cylinders — of which he was the only manufacturer in the world. Previous to him, nobody ever heard a recorded sound. Now you could buy a machine that not only recorded sound, it played music.
Edison immediately tried to connect his phonograph to his early movies, but had little luck with that.
Meanwhile, there was another guy named William Friese-Greene in London who was a wedding photographer. He too had constructed a motion picture system with a camera and a projector that worked, and he patented it in England in 1891. There is a really terrific movie about William Friese-Greene called The Magic Box (1951) with Robert Donat giving a wonderful, late performance. Just about every big-shot British actor makes a cameo appearance in this film: Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Glynis Johns (who just died), Richard Attenborough, Margaret Rutherford, Peter Ustinov, and more. The film is very nationalistically British, making a flat-out statement that though we have now forgotten, it was this belittled, mistreated Englishman who invented movies, all by himself. Of course, that’s not true. Worse still, and I didn’t put this together for a long time, although Louis Le Prince was a Frenchman, he lived in London right near Friese-Greene. Roundhay Garden is in London.
So, history has forgotten both Le Prince and Friese-Greene and given the title, “Inventor of Movies” to Thomas Edison. Why? He didn’t invent movies. No, Edison invented the Kinetoscope, the first way watch movies, and pay. Clearly, come 1888 movies were going to be invented by somebody, all the footwork had been done. It really didn’t matter who it was. There are those – mostly French people – who would like to believe it was the Lumiere brothers who invented movies. One could make a case for Auguste and Louis Lumiere inventing the movie projector, and having the very first screening in 1895. And that’s the direction movies ultimately took, but not right away.
For a solid ten years movies were watched exclusively on Kinetoscopes, and that’s where the movie business began – nickels into Kinetoscopes located in Nickelodeons. In about 1910 they began installing projectors, and by 1920 a Kinetoscope was a relic. Except that the old Kinetoscopes, which could be plugged in or cranked up, proliferated around the world.
Indeed if I have a point, and that’s dubious, it’s that Edison may well have not invented movies, nor specifically did Louis Le Prince or William Friese-Greene, either. Movies had to be invented by somebody at that point. It’s Thomas Edison who invented the movie business – how to get paid for making movies. And for more than a decade he was the biggest producer of movies in the world. It was the same time when he was the only producer of Edison Cylinders. It didn’t last. He tried to fight for it – ruining his reputation in the process – and lost. History eventually walked all over him. History is great that way. But I think it’s important to try and remember how things were when they happened. And from 1879 when Edison patented the carbon-filament light bulb, until about 1910, when movies got so big it was completely out of his control, he was technology; he was the future.
OK, so now I’m pretty sure that I’m off to Barcelona. Hasta Lavista, me amigos. Don’t take any wooden nickelodeons.