I think it will be admitted that by this means a drama acted by daylight or magnesium light may be recorded and reacted on the screen or sheet of a magic lantern, and with the assistance of the phonograph the dialogues may be repeated in the very voices of the actors.
When this is actually accomplished the photography of colors will alone be wanting to render the representation absolutely complete and for this we shall not, I trust, have long to wait.
It is not known whether or not Edison read Donisthorpe’s suggestion. At any rate, it was ten years, not till 1887, that Edison decided to see about trying to combine the phonograph, greatly improved by this time, and a motion picture apparatus.
After completing improvements on the phonograph in 1886 and awaiting the opening of new laboratory quarters, Edison found himself with some idle moments. Sometime, in the middle or late part of 1887 Edison started work on what was to become his Kinetograph, the first motion picture camera that could photograph a few seconds of action at a time, and the Kinetoscope, the popular peep-show film device which brought the magic shadow art before the modern public and opened the way for the establishment of the motion picture industry.
Edison was assisted in his motion picture experiments by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a man who had about the same relation to Edison as George Demeny had with Marey in France. In keeping with the Demeny tradition, Dickson eventually broke with his master and engaged in controversy over priority of ideas and actual contributions to various developments. But Edison and Marey both supplied the ideas and directed the work, while Dickson and Demeny were responsible for carrying out the experiments. Both contributed importantly.
Edison had employed Dickson as a young man, just after he came from England to the United States, and he was a trusted associate, having first been with Edison in the installation of the underground wires in New York City. In 1887 Dickson was called to Edison’s private laboratory and given two major projects to supervise: (1) a magnetic device for separating ores, and (2) a device to combine the sounds of the phonograph and pictures.
Late in 1887, in “Room Five” of the Edison Private Laboratory, Dickson started to work on Edison’s ideas for a motion picture device. The first efforts were centered on a cylinder recording system, analogous to the cylinder phonograph which Edison preferred to the disk type. He did not bother to patent the disk phonograph style and thereby lost a fortune as he did in other patent matters, including foreign rights to his motion picture camera and peep-show apparatus. The first Edison moving pictures were extremely tiny and had to be inspected through a microscope arrangement. Around 1870 Talbot, the photographic pioneer, in England had done some work on a similar system. The results of Edison’s experiments in this connection were not successful.
Next, during 1888 or early 1889, Edison turned to celluloid, made by the Hyatt Company in Newark, and adapted to photographic purposes by Carbutt in Philadelphia. This material was found to be too thick to be rolled conveniently on reels, and did not make a good photographic base. Edison found that notches or perforations were needed to keep the film passing through the camera and viewing device at a uniform rate. He first used notches on the bottom, and finally four perforations on each side for each picture or frame. Edison’s arrangement has continued as the work standard.
Edison looked around for a more suitable substance on which to mount the pictures—the age-old need. He found it in film just being manufactured for the first time by George Eastman at Rochester, N. Y. An order was placed and the solution appeared at hand.
For several years Eastman had been seeking a suitable substance for his Kodak cameras in order to make photography simple and foolproof and make widespread amateur use possible. For a time his “roller photography” system used paper rolls coated with a detachable photographic emulsion. This was an improvement over glass plates but the method was cumbersome as the Kodaks had to be returned to Rochester for reloading and processing. Early in 1889 Eastman found the answer in a flexible photographic base—a plastic—and film was born. In August of that year manufacturing began in his Court Street plant in Rochester. The film strips were prepared on glass sheets mounted on 100-foot long tables. Eastman applied for his film patent on December 10, 1889.