When Edison returned from the Paris Exposition of 1889, where Marey had shown him motion picture photographs mounted on a large disk and projected, and also illuminated by an electric flash as in the Tachyscope of Anschütz, Dickson was able to announce success in the motion picture project. That was in October, 1889.
It can never be decided exactly what was shown at the first demonstration, because the interests of Edison and Dickson split and the testimony was contradictory. Nothing was done about it for nearly two years, and the peep-show film machines did not go on public display until the Spring of 1894.
Dickson claimed that the pictures, synchronized with a phonograph, were projected screen size in the Fall of 1889. Edison said there was no projection at the time. Some time between 1889 and 1894, projection experiments were made but Edison did not think screen projection of motion pictures would be commercially successful, believing that a few machines would exhaust the world’s demand and once the novelty wore off the business would die. It is also possible that he was not satisfied with the experiments at projection because they must have been quite imperfect. The Edison magic-disk device had continuously running film and a shutter revolving at the rate of ten times a second. No light source then available would give projection with that set-up. Intermittent movement was required for efficient operation in the projector as in the camera.
Harper’s Weekly of June 13, 1891, carried a two-page story on the new Edison invention. The device was not claimed to be perfected but one having very wonderful possibilities. The writer said, “To say that the Kinetograph can be nothing more than a marvelous toy would be nasty.”
Edison said, “All that I have done is to perfect what has been attempted before, but did not succeed. It’s just that one step that I have taken.” On August 24, 1891, Edison applied for an American patent but decided not to invest the required sum, approximately $150, to make foreign applications. Too often in the past he found that a patent application by him was simply a form of general advertising to his imitators and competitors to start using his newest invention.
In 1891 the Kinetograph of Edison was not perfected or highly regarded. In the Engineering News of May 30, 1891, a brief note read:
The Kinetograph is the latest reported invention of Mr. Thomas Edison. In an interview published in the New York Sun, Mr. Edison described this still unperfected machine as an instrument with which he photographs a man or a company of men in action at the rate of 46 per second. The negatives are one-half inch square, taken on a continuous film of gelatine of any length desired. By an ingenious arrangement the images from the gelatine ribbon are later thrown upon a screen and this ribbon is made to move at a rate corresponding to the original rate of action, and at the same time a phonograph is made to repeat the words of the speaker represented. To thus photograph a 30-minute act of an opera, for example, a ribbon 6,400 feet long would be required, each photograph one-half inch square and requiring an inch of linear space.
The commercial sphere of the Kinetograph has not yet been defined.
That last observation was very true for the time being.
In late May of 1891 an indifferent account of the device was cabled to the London Times by its New York correspondent. The matter was commented upon in the Engineering magazine of London for June 5, 1891. That publication observed that since the time of the invention of the telephone there had been efforts to do for sight what the telephone did for sound. Of Edison’s invention of the motion picture camera and viewer it was said, “It is a matter of much less importance and much less originality than thought.” It was asserted that it would not be possible to photograph interiors at the rate of 46 pictures per second. But Edison was doing just that in his first motion picture studio.