Meanwhile, Edison’s agents, Raff & Gammon, were becoming important. The sale of the peep-show Kinetoscopes was only serving to increase the demand for projection and it was feared that the imitators of Edison, such as Lumière, Paul and Latham and others would control the field. Edison, however, was not able—for lack of time or other reasons—to meet the demands of his film agents with perfection enough to satisfy himself. His researches continued but his agents and the public were impatient.
Gammon, of the Raff & Gammon firm, decided to investigate the Armat projector which he had heard about in Washington. A five or six minute show was given on December 8, 1895, by Armat in the basement of his real estate office. In January of 1896 a deal was made whereby Edison would manufacture the projector and it would be introduced under his name, but as “Armat designed.” The agents wanted, of course, to play up the name of Edison for commercial reasons. Edison was induced to accept this arrangement by his general manager W. E. Gilmore—who, incidentally, had discharged Dickson.
A demonstration of the Armat-Edison projector was held on April 3 and on April 23, 1896, the Vitascope, as it was called, made its debut at the Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on Herald Square, 34th Street, New York City. This was a banner day in the history of the screen. The many hesitant and uncertain steps down through the centuries quickened into an assured march of progress. The public reaction to the Vitascope was excellent, although the programs presented were crude and immature. For several years to come the films offered were only short items which found their chief use as audience “chasers,” run as the final number in vaudeville shows. (Illustration facing [page 161].)
The New York Herald reported on May 3, 1896, that the subjects would soon be lengthened from 50 feet to 150 feet and 500 feet. “Gone With the Wind,” the mammoth of 1941, was 20,000 feet long. New attractions promised in the first days were to include Niagara Falls, which Langenheim had photographed with marked success a half-century earlier; a steamer going down the Lachine Rapids, and an ocean liner leaving its dock.
The Herald said: “The result is intensely interesting and pleasing but Mr. Edison is not quite satisfied yet. He wants now to improve the phonograph so that it will record double the amount of sound it does at present, and he hopes then to combine this improved phonograph with the Vitascope so as to make it possible for an audience to witness a photographic reproduction of an opera or a play—to see the movements of the actors and hear their voices as plainly as though they were witnessing the original production itself.”
The “world premiere” newspaper review concluded: “And when it is remembered what marvels Edison has produced, it would not seem at all improbable that he may yet add this one to his many others.”
The talking picture, however, did not make its real debut for three decades.
The New York Tribune on Sunday, May 3, 1896, said: “Edison’s Vitascope has made a decided hit at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall. Tomorrow evening all the pictures will be in colors. The Vitascope, together with Albert Chevalier, is drawing large audiences.”
Raff & Gammon now had something that could be sold easily; the Vitascope was everywhere well received. Eighty projectors of the Armat design were delivered by the Edison company from April to November of 1896. And Edison started renewed work on his own “Projecting Kinetoscope,” independently of Armat.
An advertising brochure for the Vitascope told the story this way: