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Before Planet of the Apes, there was Monkeyshines.
Fresh from inventing the recording and playback machine (1877), and the practical light bulb (1879), Thomas Edison focused on moving pictures. In 1889, he filed a patent for the Kinetograph, an early movie camera.
The wooden box didn’t look like much. Inside was a complicated mechanism that used a sprocket powered by an electric motor to pull the perforated edge of unexposed celluloid film - it had been recently invented by George Eastman - in front of a lens at a speed of 46 frames per second. The device was so large that Edison called it the “dog house.”
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Edison inspecting a film. Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science
“But what a perfectly marvelous dog house!” wrote The Nickelodeon in 1910, then a brand new magazine covering the budding movie industry. “It stands there in the Edison works as the absolute foundation of an amusement business that encircles the world, giving employment to thousands and numbering its daily devotees by hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”
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The mechanism of Edison’s first movie camera. Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science
Edison also invented the Kinetoscope, another wooden box that allowed people to watch movies through a peephole one at a time. He also hired the Scottish inventor William K. L. Dickson and put him in charge of the film business. Dickson and another movie pioneer, William Heise, took the Edison camera for a spin in 1889 (or perhaps 1890 – the records are blurry) and made Monkeyshines No. 1, possibly the first film ever made in the United States (see GIF below).
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A GIF made from Monkeyshines No. 1. The first American movie star was either John Ott or G. Sacco Albanese. The record is fuzzy.
The film, all 56 seconds of it, may show lab worker John Ott “horsing around” — the meaning of monkeyshines – in front of the lens. Alternately, the “actor” might also be G. Sacco Albanese, another lab worker at the company.
It doesn’t look like much, but it gave Edison a business idea. In 1893, he erected a wooden building covered with tarpaper behind his lab in Menlo Park, N.J., and called it Black Maria. It was perhaps the world’s first movie production studio, and it started making film loops for the Kinetoscope (see below).
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Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science
Hundreds of Edison loops and films survive in the collection of the Library of Congress. They show President William McKinley’s inauguration, Mark Twain, the Sioux Ghost Dance, and also a pair of boxing cats (eat this, Buzzfeed!).
Edison, who later moved the film studio to the Bronx, was already thinking about the big picture, including Technicolor, surround sound, and even music videos. “Thus the motion picture of the future will show apparently solid objects projected in natural colors and accompanied in natural reproduction by all the concomitant sounds,” The Nickelodeonquoted him in 1910. “It will revolutionize the stage. The world’s greatest musicians, singers and actors can then be heard in the most insignificant hamlet at a nominal price.”
“The possibilities of the motion picture in the field of entertainment are tremendous and unbounded,” Edison went on, “and opportunity is offered to the inventors of the world to solve some interesting problems before the Utopian state I picture will be realized.”
Sunday’s Oscars will give us an annual taste of the Utopia Edison imagined.