Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion PicturesQuigley, Martin
History
Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures
Quigley, Martin
Lantern projection; Motion pictures -- History
As in France, a number of men immediately started making cameras and
projectors in England. The patent rights were confused, chiefly because
Edison neglected to secure foreign coverage, leaving the field wide
open.
In the United States two factors dominated the experimentation: (1)
the Anschütz Electrical Tachyscope, shown at the Chicago Fair in 1893
and (2) the Edison peep-show film device on display in many places,
starting in New York in the Spring of 1894.
The projection of life-size motion pictures on a screen before an
audience might have been achieved considerably earlier had Edison
not felt that there would be no commercial market for such a device.
The little peep-show models could be manufactured at rather low cost
and sold at a profit, so no impetus was given to the development of
a screen projector which might, he thought, quickly dissipate the
public’s interest and destroy the market. But, it may be recalled,
the screen projector, combined with the talking phonograph, had been
Edison’s original goal when he started the experiments in 1887.
One of the men who was impressed by Anschütz’s Electrical Tachyscope at
the Chicago Fair was a young Virginian, Thomas Armat. He was a man of
means and though associated in a real estate office in Washington, D.
C., still had time to follow his scientific interests which induced him
to attend the Bliss School of Electricity in Washington. At this time,
Armat had already invented a conduit for an electric railway and had
refused an offer to interest himself in the distribution of the Edison
peep-show film Kinetoscope. He wanted screen projection.
At the Bliss School Armat was introduced to C. Francis Jenkins, a
young Government clerk, who also was interested in scientific matters.
He had studied the Edison Kinetoscope and, for the Pure Food Show in
Convention Hall, in November of 1894, had shown a model which instead
of Edison’s revolving shutter had revolving electric lights, based on
the Uchatius idea. In March of 1894 Jenkins received a patent on a
motion picture camera which used a revolving lens system called the
Phantoscope. There is no evidence that Jenkins ever made that camera
operate efficiently. It was described in the _Photographic Times_ of
July, 1894, as being only five by five by eight inches in size and
weighing ten pounds. Pictures of an athlete in action, said to have
been taken with Jenkins’ device were reproduced.
Jenkins was having difficulty achieving projection. Armat and he
decided to form a partnership. Armat was to build a projector after
Jenkins’ design and, in return, he would receive rights to the rotating
lens camera patent. The results were a failure. Armat decided to
continue with his own ideas and there was no objection, as he was
supplying the money and the place for the work in the basement of his
real estate office at 1313 “F” Street, in Washington.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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