Movies as we know them today were in their infancy one hundred years ago. Motion pictures were not invented by any one person, and they did not come into existence on a single day. According to Wenden, there is a plaque on the side of the Macy's 34th Street store in New York, stating that at that site on April 23 of 1896, Thomas Edison's motion pictures were projected (Wenden 10). At that time there was a music hall at that location. Two Germans, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, demonstrated an invention called the Bioscope in 189t, and during the same year, the Lumiere family presented a performance of film to an audience of thirty-three customers at the Salon Indien of the Grand CafT in Paris. The program was of ten short films, lasting a total of twenty minutes. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the early history of motion pictures in order to understand the infancy of this technological invention. The emphasis is on the mechanical aspects of the films and the machines that created them, rather than the artistic elements of the cinema, although it is not possible to completely separate the two parts of film history.
Moving pictures built upon the development of photography, which appeared during the middle of the 19th century (Wenden 12). The first successful movie camera emerged from the Thomas Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, also the birthplace of the ticker tape, the telegraph, telephone, electric light bulb, typewriter, and phonograph. Edison's early films were made in an odd looking building called "The Black Maria," a darkened enclosure made of wood and canvas with no windows. The earliest short films were of people dancing, sneezing, and playing the fiddle. Edison was mostly interested in synchronizing his moving pictures with the sound from the phonograph and took inadequate steps to protect his invention with a patent. The time seemed to be right for this invention, as several people in the U....