Filming Years 18901900s

by zecoathediesel

Inspired from the Video Game Years. In this new series, it's just a documentary of the film industry. But instead of going year by year. It'll be decade by decade. In this series I'll be writing facts about people's favorite director, actor/actresses, and movies. I'll also be covering anything connected to film industry such as real wars, rise of television and more.

3. Kinetoscope

With the works done by Muybridge, Eastman, and anyone else that had a connection to the camera or some kind of pre-film work. Thomas Edison would be impressed and inspired to created a camera where its main purpose is to just film something and find a way for anyone to see the film itself. So Edison turned to a young Scottish man, William K. L. Dickson to create two machines. One for filming and the other for showing.

So William, along with his assistant, Charles Brown, made two machines. First machine they created was the Kinetograph. Thanks to George Eastman and his works on the roll film, this machine was the one that would film and capture some type of movement. There's a debate on when the Kinetograph came out. Some say June of 1889 others say November of 1890. Well regardless, the Kinetograph used a 35mm film and it had sprocket to help capturing still image and it would continue to take more and more pictures with would later use to create motion.

They tested the camera in a short called "Monkeyshines" and in 1891 a prototype for the second machine the Kinetoscope was created. It was first demonstrated at the Federation of Women's Club with a short little film known as "Dickson Greeting"which features William Dickson himself taking off his hat and bowing. After which Dickson went back to improve the Kinetoscope and work on the coin slot for the machines, when it was completed it was shown again, but this time to a more wide public at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. Then on April 14, 1894, the first public Kinetoscope parlor was in New York City. After that the product took off from there. They became popular for a while and they were appearing in not only parlors or carnivals, but they were also at hotel lobbies, and even went global to places like Paris and London.

The Kinetophone was some sort of add on to the Kinetoscope, in which this machine was an attempt to bring sounds into a movie. About 45 of the machines were made and tested around 1894-1895 and it was a massive failure. The point of the Kinetophone was almost like a normal Kinetoscope, accept this one has earphones for people to put on and as they watch the film they would hear the sound, but the major drawback to them was the sounds did a very poor job on synchronizing the sound with the picture and around this time better synchronizing devices were being made, so the Kinetophone was very short lived and it would take a lot more years before we finally have synchronize sounds in movies.