Nahno McLein

1.    Who could be said to have ‘invented’ cinema, and how did their device improve upon other emergent film technologies?

At the end of the nineteenth century, many inventors were fascinated with the moving picture. While the Zoetrope and the Praxinoscope set the principles by giving “the impression of movement”, Etienne-Jules Marey and Augustin-Louis Le Prince presented machines to only photograph, not project, moving images (James Chapman: 53). George Eastman perfected and standardized celluloid film rolls by 1890, essential for filming and projecting, but still others lead the way to the spectacle of cinema (Filmreference).

 In 1891, the American Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson invented the Kinetoscope viewing box and shortly after the heavy Kinetograph camera, enabling one person peepshows of less than thirty seconds. Two of their attributes became standard in the following years: a “stop-motion device to regulate intermittent motion of film strip” and two-rowed holes in the film to pull synchronous and effectively through the machine (Filmreference). Commercial use launched in 1894, using the first film studio, the Black Maria, in West Orange, New Jersey; consequently, various Kinetoscope parlours emerged in the USA and Europe, but they lacked the cinema-feature of collective viewing (James Chapman: 53).
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