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21/11/1894: The Kinetoscope's First Rival
In addition to his close association with the Lathams during this period, it seems that W.K.L Dickson, while still employed by Thomas Edison, was also offering technical advice and ideas to two other potential competitors, Henry Norton Marvin, a college teacher, and skilled machinist Herman Casler. It could be that Dickson was growing increasingly disillusioned with his employer: Edison had passed over Dickson for the task of inventing a film projector, handing it instead to Charles Kayser; and his relationship with Edison’s new general manager, William E. Gilmore had got off to a rocky start when Gilmore insisted that all the copyrights filed in Dickson’s name be passed over to Edison.
Dickson, it seems, offered Marvin advice on the design of a simple alternative to Edison’s Kinetoscope, which Marvin then worked on with his partner, Casler. The machine – which they called a Mutoscope – was little more than a mechanical version of the simple process of the flick-book whereby simple drawings, each slightly different to its predecessor, are drawn on succeeding pages and then flicked to give the impression of motion. Instead of drawings, the Mutoscope contained a sequence of photographs arranged around the perimeter of a drum which rotated when a handle was turned, creating the illusion of movement.. Marvin and Casler’s invention, which was patented by Casler on 21st November 1894, was, in a way, superior to Edison’s Kinetoscope because it didn’t require an electric motor to drive the film, nor did it require special illumination. Viewers could also control the speed at which the film ran, even reversing it completely if they so desired.
The Mutoscope quickly became as popular as the Kinetoscope, although probably because of the titillating nature of many of the films they showed rather than any technical superiority. The most popular films were of the “What the Butler Saw” variety, which showed a view through a keyhole of the lady of a house removing her clothes. It was pretty tame action – it wouldn’t even merit a 15 rating today, let alone an 18 – but these movies were considered pretty racy stuff in the late 19th Century. [ADD]
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