A report on Movie projector and Kinetoscope

Interior view of Kinetoscope with peephole viewer at top of cabinet

Sheet of images from one of the three Monkeyshines films (c. 1889–90) produced as tests of an early version of the Kinetoscope

An early projector and seats from a movie theater

An acre in size, Edison's exhibit at the Exposition Universelle included an entire electrical power station. (Smithsonian Institution/William J. Hammer Collection)

1910's 35mm hand-cranked tinplate toy movie projector manufactured by Leonhard Müller in Nuremberg, Germany.

Charles Kayser of the Edison lab seated behind the Kinetograph. Portability was not among the camera's virtues.

35 mm Kinoton FP30ST movie projector, with parts labeled. (Click thumbnail for larger text.)

35 mm filmstrip of the Edison production Butterfly Dance (c. 1894–95), featuring Annabelle Whitford Moore, in the format that would become standard for both still and motion picture photography around the world.

Mechanical sequence when image is shown twice and then advanced.
Outer sprockets rotate continuously while the frame advance sprockets are controlled by the mechanism shown – a Geneva drive.

Construction of the imposing Black Maria began in December 1892. In order to take full advantage of sunlight, the tar paper–lined studio was equipped with a hinged, flip-up roof and the entire structure could rotate on a track. "It obeys no architectural rules," declared Dickson, who found it "productive of the happiest effects in the films."

Imaging lens Diastar of an Askania 35 mm movie projector (focal length: 400 mm)

A San Francisco Kinetoscope parlor, c. 1894–95.

Christie AW3 platter, BIG SKY Industries console, and Century SA projector

Advertisement announcing the initial Kinetoscope exhibition in London, held on October 17, 1894.

The 1895 version of the Kinetophone in use, showing the earphones that lead to the cylinder phonograph within the cabinet

Reverse side of a kinetophone, showing a wax cylinder phonograph driven by a belt.

In the first decade of the 1900s, years before developing the compact Home Projecting Kinetoscope, Edison marketed an essentially theatrical 35 mm Projecting Kinetoscope for domestic use.

Simulated wide screen image with 1.96 to 1 ratio as it would be seen in a camera viewfinder or on a theater screen

Image of a Projecting Kinetoscope published in 1914

Simulated anamorphed image with 1.33 to 1 ratio (4:3) as it would appear on a frame of film

Promotion of Kinetophone system, January 1913

The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video.

- Kinetoscope

Between 1890 and 1894 he concentrated on the exploitation of an automatic coin-operated version that was an inspiration for Edison Company's Kinetoscope.

- Movie projector

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Max and Emil Skladanowsky in front of a projection screen

Max Skladanowsky

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German inventor and early filmmaker.

Max Skladanowsky (right) in 1934 with his brother Eugen and the Bioscop

Along with his brother Emil, he invented the Bioscop, an early movie projector the Skladanowsky brothers used to display the first moving picture show to a paying audience on 1 November 1895, shortly before the public debut of the Lumière Brothers' Cinématographe in Paris on 28 December 1895.

Their further choice of subjects seemed influenced by the films they probably viewed in the Kinetoscope that was installed in Berlin in March.

Auguste and Louis Lumière

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The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) and Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948), were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.

Cinématographe Lumière at the Institut Lumière, France

Tomb of the Lumière brothers in the New Guillotière Cemetery in Lyon

Lumière ou Projection privée (2010), by the French painter Arnaud Courlet de Vregille, displayed in l'Eden-Théâtre, the first cinema in the world, in La Ciotat.

Lumières La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon 1895

Cinématographe advertising poster with image from L'Arroseur arrosé

Autochrome colour picture by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud of North-African soldiers, Oise, France, 1917.

Their house in Lyon is now the Institut Lumière museum.

Their screening of a single film on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the "Society for the Development of the National Industry" in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film.

Thomas Edison believed projection of films wasn't as viable a business model as offering the films in the "peepshow" kinetoscope device.

A modern 4K digital cinema camera in 2018, Canon EOS C700 MultiDyne

Movie camera

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Type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either on an image sensor or onto film stock, in order to produce a moving image to project onto a movie screen.

The chronophotographic gun invented by Étienne-Jules Marey.

Film-gun at the Institut Lumière, France

The Aeroscope (1909) was the first hand-held movie camera.

The Red EPIC camera has been used to shoot numerous feature filmsincluding The Amazing Spiderman and The Hobbit.

Basic operation: When the shutter inside the camera is opened, the film is illuminated. When the shutter is completely covering the film gate, the film strip is being moved one frame further by one or two claws which advance the film by engaging and pulling it through the perforations.

Multiple cameras to take surround images (1900 Cinéorama system, for modern version see Circle-Vision 360°

Various German Agfa Movex Standard 8 home movie cameras

The strips of frames are projected through a movie projector at a specific frame rate (number of frames per second) to show a moving picture.

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a Scottish inventor and employee of Thomas Edison, designed the Kinetograph Camera in 1891.

Zoopraxiscope

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Black-and-white animation of a colored zoopraxiscope (without distortion, hence the elongated form)

The zoopraxiscope (initially named zoographiscope and zoogyroscope) is an early device for displaying moving images and is considered an important predecessor of the movie projector.

The device appears to have been one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson's Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system.

35 mm movie film

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Film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard.

Eastman (L) giving Edison the first roll of movie film, which was 35 mm

An "over-under" 3D frame. Both left and right eye images are contained within the normal height of a single 2D frame.

A diagram of the VistaVision format, affectionately dubbed "Lazy 8" because it is eight perforations long and runs horizontally (lying down)

Areas on an Academy-width 35 mm spherical film print:

The ubiquity of 35 mm movie projectors in commercial movie theaters made 35 mm the only motion picture format that could be played in almost any cinema in the world, until digital projection largely superseded it in the 21st century.

With the advent of flexible film, Thomas Edison quickly set out on his invention, the Kinetoscope, which was first shown at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893.

Sound film

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Motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film.

Image from The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894 or 1895), produced by W.K.L. Dickson as a test of the early version of the Edison Kinetophone, combining the Kinetoscope and phonograph.

Eric M. C. Tigerstedt (1887–1925) was one of pioneers of sound-on-film technology. Tigerstedt in 1915.

Poster featuring Sarah Bernhardt and giving the names of eighteen other "famous artists" shown in "living visions" at the 1900 Paris Exposition using the Gratioulet-Lioret system.

Newspaper ad for a 1925 presentation of Phonofilm shorts, touting their technological distinction: no phonograph.

Poster for Warner Bros.' Don Juan (1926), the first major motion picture to premiere with a full-length synchronized soundtrack. Audio recording engineer George Groves, the first in Hollywood to hold the job, would supervise sound on Woodstock, 44 years later.

Western Electric engineer E. B. Craft, at left, demonstrating the Vitaphone projection system. A Vitaphone disc had a running time of about 11 minutes, enough to match that of a 1000 ft reel of 35 mm film.

Newspaper ad from a fully equipped theater in Tacoma, Washington, showing The Jazz Singer, on Vitaphone, and a Fox newsreel, on Movietone, together on the same bill.

Dorothy Mackaill and Milton Sills in The Barker, First National's inaugural talkie. The film was released in December 1928, two months after Warner Bros. acquired a controlling interest in the studio.

The Prague-raised star of Blackmail (1929), Anny Ondra, was an industry favorite, but her thick accent became an issue when the film was reshot with sound. Without post-dubbing capacity, her dialogue was simultaneously recorded offscreen by actress Joan Barry. Ondra's British film career was over.

The first Soviet talkie, Putevka v zhizn (The Road to Life; 1931), concerns the issue of homeless youth. As Marcel Carné put it, "in the unforgettable images of this spare and pure story we can discern the effort of an entire nation."

Director Heinosuke Gosho's Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine; 1931), a production of the Shochiku studio, was the first major commercial and critical success of Japanese sound cinema.

Alam Ara premiered March 14, 1931, in Bombay. The first Indian talkie was so popular that "police aid had to be summoned to control the crowds." It was shot with the Tanar single-system camera, which recorded sound directly onto the film.

Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), one of the first sound films about sound filmmaking, depicts microphones dangling from the rafters and multiple cameras shooting simultaneously from soundproofed booths. The poster shows a camera unboothed and unblimped, as it might be when shooting a musical number with a prerecorded soundtrack.

Example of a variable-area sound track—the width of the white area is proportional to the amplitude of the audio signal at each instant.

The unkind cover of Photoplay, December 1929, featuring Norma Talmadge. As movie historian David Thomson puts it, "sound proved the incongruity of [her] salon prettiness and tenement voice."

Premiering February 1, 1929, MGM's The Broadway Melody was the first smash-hit talkie from a studio other than Warner Bros. and the first sound film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Poster for Acabaram-se os otários (1929), performed in Portuguese. The first Brazilian talkie was also the first anywhere in an Iberian language.

Westfront 1918 (1930) was celebrated for its expressive re-creation of battlefield sounds, like the doomful whine of an unseen grenade in flight.

Image of sumo wrestlers from Melodie der Welt (1929), "one of the initial successes of a new art form", in André Bazin's description. "It flung the whole earth onto the screen in a jigsaw of visual images and sounds."

No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph.

In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector, allowing for synchronization.