Technological Innovations

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector but introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video, by creating the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. In a strip of film, it was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer peered through a peephole. Behind the peephole was a spinning wheel with a narrow slit that acted as a shutter, permitting a momentary view of each of the 46 frames passing in front of the shutter every second. The result was a lifelike representation of persons and objects in motion. In December 1892, Edison began construction of a motion picture studio near his West Orange laboratory, known as the Black Maria. The first Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City on April 14, 1894.

The concept of moving images as entertainment was not new by the latter part of the 19th century. Magic lanterns and other devices had been employed in popular entertainment for generations. Another mechanism called a Phenakistiscope consisted of a disc with images of successive phases of movement which could be spun to simulate movement. Additionally, there was the Zoopraxiscope, developed by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, which projected a series of images in successive phases of movement obtained through the use of multiple cameras. An encounter with Muybridge's work and ideas appears to have spurred Thomas Edison to pursue the development of a motion picture system. Two days after a Muybridge exhibition near the Edison laboratory, Muybridge and Edison met at the Edison lab in West Orange and discussed the possibility of joining the Zoopraxiscope with the Edison phonograph. No such collaboration was undertaken, but in October 1888, Edison filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office announcing his plans to create a device that would do "for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." The introduction of George Eastman's roll film system of photography in 1885 was to break the technological block that was holding back the emergence of a practical system for recording and displaying moving pictures. In Europe, Edison had also met French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey who used a continuous roll of film in his Chronophotographe to produce a sequence of still images.

The Kinetoscope's legacy is evident in its influence on subsequent technological developments, such as the standardization of the 35mm film gauge and the transition to projection systems. The device's international impact, particularly its influence on inventors like the Lumière brothers, underscores the interconnected nature of technological progress. The concept of the motion picture was first introduced 1891 in a private demonstration and public parlors opened in 1894. However, it wasn't until the Lumière brothers released the Cinématographe in 1895 that motion pictures were projected for audience viewing. In the United States, film established itself as a popular form of entertainment with the nickelodeon theater beginning in 1905. The release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 marked the birth of the talking film, and by 1930, silent film was a thing of the past. Technicolor emerged for film around the same time and found early success with movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. By then, most of the major film studios had moved to Hollywood. The evolution of film exhibition has been driven by a continuous cascade of technological advancements: from nickelodeons to talkies, color film to widescreen formats, surround sound to multiplex cinemas, digital projection to 3D cinema, IMAX, and ultimately to streaming services — all of which trace their ancestry back to Edison and Dickson's flickering peephole machine of 1894.

The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: the first is camera obscura image projection; the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. The first permanent photograph of a camera image was made in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera. Niépce had been experimenting with ways to fix the images of a camera obscura since 1816. The photograph Niépce succeeded in creating shows the view from his window. It was made using an 8-hour exposure on pewter coated with bitumen. Niépce called his process "heliography." Niépce corresponded with the inventor Louis Daguerre, and the pair entered into a partnership to improve the heliographic process. Daguerre discovered that he could create an image on plates coated with silver iodide, which could then be permanently affixed to the plates with the use of sodium chloride. Exposure time quickly dropped from eight hours to a mere 30 minutes. His photographic process, which he called the "daguerreotype," proved the next major step in the evolution of modern photography. On August 19, 1839, the technical details of the daguerreotype were made public at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

The work of Ibn al-Haytham on optics, circulated through Latin translations, played a significant role in inspiring notable individuals such as Witelo, John Peckham, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler. The camera obscura was used as a drawing aid since at least around 1550. By the late 17th century, portable versions of the device housed in tents and boxes became commonly used for drawing purposes. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon described the use of a camera obscura for safely observing solar eclipses, and Leonardo da Vinci described its use in his notes: "When the images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room, you will see on the paper all those objects in their natural shapes and colours. They will be reduced in size, and upside down, owing to the intersection of the rays at the aperture." The camera obscura had made it possible to successfully project an image — the next challenge was to make that image permanent. The first attempts at freezing an image were made by Tom Wedgwood in 1800. Drawing on the discovery by German natural philosopher Johann Heinrich Schulze that silver salts are light sensitive, he began experimenting by coating paper with silver nitrate and placing it in a camera obscura. His experiments were unsuccessful — the image refused to hold on the paper.

William Henry Fox Talbot's calotype process solved the daguerreotype's greatest limitation by creating a negative image on paper from which multiple positive prints could be made. This established the fundamental principle of photography that we use even today: the negative-positive process. Although the daguerreotype remained popular, it was the calotype that laid the foundation for modern film photography. By the 1850s, the wet collodion process improved photo quality and reduced exposure time. In 1888, George Eastman launched the Kodak camera — users could take photos and send the camera back for development. The Autochrome process, developed by the Lumière brothers, produced color images. Instant photography appeared in 1947 with the Polaroid camera. In the 1990s, digital cameras replaced film, allowing people to see photos immediately. By the 20th century, innovations like 35mm film in 1925 and Kodachrome color film in 1935 revolutionized documentary and artistic photography. Roger Fenton's images of the Crimean War and Mathew Brady's coverage of the American Civil War established photography as a powerful tool for journalistic and historical documentation. The camera also directly enabled the invention of cinema — the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe of 1895 was built directly on the optical and chemical principles of still photography — and its lineage runs unbroken through to the digital sensors and smartphone cameras of today.

Of all his inventions, Thomas A. Edison was most fond of the phonograph. As a result of his work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone, Edison happened upon a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording and one for playback. Thomas Edison received the first prototype of the phonograph just 30 hours after sketching out the plans. When he finished speaking into it, he played back the recording. "Mary had a little lamb," the recording began. "Its fleece was white as snow." When Edison heard those words in 1877, it was the first time that a human voice had been captured in a medium and played back as sound.

The first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings called phonautograms, made in 1857. They consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. Scott's device was not imagined as a device to reproduce sound — his recordings were intended to be visual representations. Not until 2008 were researchers able to play back the sound waves captured on these phonautograms, by optically scanning the sheets and digitally reconstructing the waveforms held within. Edison's flash of inspiration occurred when he was working on a high-speed telegraph transmitter. The device indented Morse code into a taut length of paper tape, and Edison likened the sound to "human talk heard indistinctly." He had been working on improvements to Alexander Graham Bell's nascent telephone, and wondered if a telephone message could be recorded in the same way as a telegraph message. A French poet named Charles Cros also conceived of a phonograph in 1877 that was virtually Edison's equal in purpose, but never realized it. Edison was probably unaware of Cros's work.