The Early Days of Cinema: the Birth of the Movies

With around $9billion taken at the US box office each year – and over $23billion worldwide – it’s clear that the movies have become an important part of our lives. It’s often easy to forget about the early days of cinema, and how we developed the technology that makes today’s movies possible.

WKL Dickson, a Scotsman working under Thomas Edison at his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, developed the first complete motion picture system. Dickson’s kinetograph was a camera that solved the problems of recording film sequences without multiple cameras or time-consuming stop-motion methods.

Weighing in at 500lb and the size of a refrigerator, Dickson’s camera was by no means perfect. The longest films recorded on his camera were only about a minute in length, while the shortest were just 16 seconds long, and the kinetoscope used to display these films could only be viewed by a single person at a time. However, the kinetograph’s claim to fame is that it recorded the first copyrighted motion picture in history, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, and despite its shortcomings the system became wildly popular. When the first peep show opened in New York on April 14th 1894 hundreds of people queued around the block, eager to pay 25 cents to watch a short projection.

Over the next few years the battle to improve this new technology was fierce. Several systems were developed simultaneously that solved the problem of projecting the image to multiple viewers, so it’s hard to credit a single person with the development. Whoever developed the technology, along with an ingenious invention by Otway and Greg Latham that made it possible to create longer films, allowed the cinema to finally break out into the mass market.

By 1906 the US was home to over 1,000 nickelodeons (so named because the entry charge was a nickel), and by the following year 4,000 more had sprung up. By 1908 the theaters of New York were admitting 200,000 customers every single day. In 1911 the Nestor Film Company set up in a dusty Californian burg originally named Cahuenga Valley. Renamed Hollywood after a local ranch, the town soon became the centre of the universe for movie production.

This craze continued for the next two decades until, by 1925, going to the movies was the nation’s favorite pastime – and making movies it’s fifth largest industry. Clearly, the cinema was here to stay.

It’s difficult to imagine today how incredible this simple technology would have seemed to those who first viewed it. We’ve grown so used to multi-million dollar budgets and computer generated special effects that it’s hard to believe that people would excitedly queue around the block to watch a projection of a steam train, a dancing girl, or the simple spectacle of a sneezing man.

However, it’s clear that without these humble roots we could not enjoy the movies we have today. The movies are still one of the world’s favorite pastimes, and we owe it all to the groundbreaking inventions of Dickson and Edison.

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