Thomas Edison
received a patent in 1897 for the kinetoscope, the forerunner of
the motion-picture film projector. Edison and his assistant W.K.L.
Dickson had begun work on the project in hopes of boosting sales
of the phonograph, which Edison had invented in1877, by enlivening
sound recordings with moving pictures. Unable to synchronize the
two media, he introduced the kinetoscope, a device for viewing
moving pictures without sound.
This 1903 kinetoscope is part of the Shiloh Museum's Vaughan-Applegate
Photography Collection. The collection includes hundreds of pieces
of photographic equipment collected by Springdale photographer Bruce
Vaughan. In 1978, Dr. Stanley Applegate of Springdale
purchased part of Vaughan's collection and donated it to the museum. Vaughan
then donated the remaining portion.
Bruce Vaughan
has this to say about the kinetoscope:
"When
Edison invented motion pictures, he was offered a chance to patent
[the] motion picture process in Great Britain for a very small
amount of money. If I remember correctly, it was around $300.
But he turned it down, because he said no one would sit in a
dark room to watch pictures move on a screen. He thought the
ultimate use of his kinetoscope would be in penny arcades, where
men could in, deposit a penny, and watch Little Egypt doing her
dance – or some such thing. But he decided to take the
insides of a kinetoscope, which is the front part of this thing
(where all the gears are), and put it on an oak board. And on
the back of the board he placed a lantern-slide projector. Notice
the projector still has a carrier to show lantern slides and
also that it can be shifted on the base board so that the image
will project to the side of the transport mechanism on the front
for showing slides on the screen as well as movies. This was
the first movie projector manufactured in the U.S. to show professional
movies- there had been some 'toys' before. And a projector identical
to this was used at Koser and Bial Music Hall [in New York City]
to project the first motion pictures ever seen in the U.S. by
a theater audience."
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