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9/4/1896: The'Colonel' Starts Shooting
On the 9th April 1896, self-styled “Colonel" William N. Selig, a former magician and minstrel show manager, founded the Mutoscope and Film Co. in Chicago. He would later change the name of the company to Selig Polyscope, and it would soon grow to be one of the major early film studios.
Born in Chicago on the 14th March 1864, Selig moved to California in his teens for the sake of his health, and became a manager of a health spa. Selig’s career took something of a left-turn at some point, however, because by 1894 he was touring provincial America as “Selig, Conjurer” and, later, “Colonel Selig, conjurer”.
In 1895, he viewed an Edison Kinetoscope and was intrigued – not so much by the mechanics of the machine, but by the money-making potential of film. Selig parted company with the travelling minstrel company, and opened a photographic store in Chicago. He tinkered with equipment of his own but lacked the necessary know-how to build a projector. He did, however, know an engineer who had constructed a knock-off Cinematographe for a Lumiere showman, and who still possessed the specifications. From these drawings Selig’s camera and Polyscope projector were built.
Selig began shooting movies in April 1896. The first was The Tramp and the Dog. The first offices of Selig’s company were located on Western Avenue, near Irving Park Road in Chicago. [ADD]
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