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27/2/1888 - "Al" Gets Involved
Although there is speculation that Thomas Alva (“Al”) Edison was interested in the concept of motion pictures before 1888, there can be no doubt that any passing interest he may have had in the matter was transformed into something more substantial after his meeting with moving picture pioneer Edweard Muybridge on the 27th of February 1888.
While on a lecture tour of America, Muybridge paid a visit to Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey and suggested a collaboration to combine his zoopraxiscope and the inventor’s phonograph (much as William Friese-Greene had done the year before). Edison’s interest was piqued, and together they attempted to make the world’s first talking picture by capturing actors Edwin Booth and Lillian Russell in both sight and sound.
The result of their collaboration was laughably amateurish, achieving the crudest possible form of synchronisation of sight and sound by simply starting their respective inventions at the same time. Muybridge was understandably unimpressed with the outcome of their efforts and, as the phonograph had not yet been adapted to cater for large audiences, he withdrew from the project.
Edison, however, was not so easily discouraged, and began working on a device for creating moving images along similar lines to his phonograph. He envisaged a series of 42,000 tiny images, each no more than 1/32 of an inch wide, positioned in a spiral formation around the surface of a cylinder, in much the same way as sound recordings were etched onto a phonograph’s tinfoil cylinder. Each turn of the cylinder would expose 180 images to an individual spectator viewing the image through a microscope while listening to sound from a phonograph. Each image would be illuminated from within the cylinder by electric sparks.
Although recent research into the Edison archives suggests he didn’t set his many-monickered assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to work on turning his ideas into reality until June 1889, Edison filed a caveat (an announcement of intention that prevented other inventors from filing for an interfering patent for 12 months) with the Patents Office on 17th October 1888.
“I am experimenting upon an instrument,” he wrote, “which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such form as to be both cheap, practical and convenient.”
Edison intended to call his invention a “Kinetoscope”, from the Greek words “kineto” meaning “movement, and “scopos” meaning “to watch”. [ADD]
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