Mubridge and American George Eastman furthered the development of commercial motion pictures. American inventor Thomas Alva Edison is credited with the development of the first film, and even the first motion picture. In 1891 Edison patented his Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewer (ôSignificant Developmentsàö). In 1877, Edison invented a phonograph that recorded sound on a cylinder. The following year he invented the Kinetoscope, the first machine to produce motion pictures by a rapid succession of individual views. A few years later he developed a phonograph in which the cylinder was replaced by a disk upon which sound was impressed. By synchronizing the phonograph and Kinetoscope, Edison produced the first talking motion picture in 1913, but he was uninterested in further development of this concept.
The motion picture camera invented by Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant William Dickson was developed for the purpose of Edison providing ôa visual accompaniment for his vastly successful phonographö (Cook 5). Edison and DicksonÆs Kinetograph, perfected in 1889, was basically an experiment in optics, and not intended as a new art form. EdisonÆs motion picture camera was bulky, but it was the first. Louis Lumiere in France developed his own motion picture device called the Cinematographe that was unlike EdisonÆs invention in that it was portable, and ôserved as a camera, film processing unit, and projector all in oneö enabling Lumiere to shoot footage in the morning, process it in the afternoon, and then project it to an audience that eveningö (Yahnke 2). As film historian and teacher Arthur Knight points out, this new invention of moving picture devices was international. By the end of the 19th Century, ôa variety of cameras and projectors was introduced almost simultaneously in the United States, in England, France and Germanyö (11). In 1894, projection was achieved through the inventions of several men inclu...