Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins' patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vitascope is a large electrically-powered projector that uses light to cast images. The images being cast are originally taken by a kinetoscope mechanism onto gelatin film. Using an intermittent mechanism, the film negatives produced up to fifty frames per second. The shutter opens and closes to reveal new images. This device can produce up to 3,000 negatives per minute.[1] With the original Phantoscope and before he partnered with Armat, Jenkins displayed the earliest documented projection of a filmed motion picture in June 1894 in Richmond, Indiana.
Armat independently sold the Phantoscope to The Kinetoscope Company. The company realized that their Kinetoscope would soon be a thing of the past with the rapidly advancing proliferation of early cinematic engineering. By 1897, just two years after the Vitascope was first demonstrated, the technology was being nationally adopted. Hawaii and Texas were among the first to incorporate the Vitascope into their picture shows.[2]
Vitascope was also used briefly as a trademark by Warner Brothers in 1930 for a widescreen process used for films such as Song of the Flame. Warner was trying to compete with other widescreen processes such as Magnascope, Widevision, Natural Vision (no relation to the later 3-D film process), and Fox Grandeur.[3]
History
Thomas Edison was slow to develop a projection system at this time, since his company's single-user Kinetoscopes were very profitable. However, films projected for large audiences could generate more profits since fewer machines were needed in proportion to the number of viewers. Thus, others sought to develop their own projection systems.[citation needed]
One inventor who led the way was Charles Francis Jenkins who created the Phantoscope. Jenkins was behind the earliest documented projection of a motion picture before an audience. Using film and electric light, the film of a vaudeville dancer was projected in Richmond, Indiana on June 6, 1894. Woodville Latham, with his sons, created the Eidoloscope projector which was presented publicly in April 1895. William Kennedy Dickson apparently advised the Lathams on their machine, offering technical knowledge, a situation which led to Dickson leaving Edison's employment on April 2, 1895.[citation needed]
Dickson formed the American Mutoscope Company in December 1895 with partners Herman Casler, Henry Norton Marvin, and Elias Koopman. The company, which eventually became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, soon became a major competitor to the Edison Company.[citation needed]
During the same period, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat modified Jenkins' patented Phantoscope. It was publicly demonstrated in Atlanta in the Autumn of 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition. The two soon parted ways, each claiming credit for the invention.[citation needed]
Armat showed the Phantoscope to Raff & Gammon, owners of the Kinetoscope Company, who recognized its profit potential in the face of declining kinetoscope business. They negotiated with Armat to purchase rights to the Phantoscope and approached Edison for his approval. The Edison Manufacturing Company agreed to manufacture the machine and to produce films for it, but on the condition it be advertised as a new Edison invention named the Vitascope. Edison skeptics argue that the Vitascope has a jaded past. In addition, critics claim the Vitascope was nothing more than a repackaging of the phantoscope with slight modifications.[2]
The Vitascope's first theatrical exhibition was on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. Other competitors soon displayed their own projection systems in American theaters, including the re-engineered Eidoloscope, which copied Vitascope innovations; the LumièreCinématographecode: fra promoted to code: fr , which had already debuted in Europe in 1895; Birt Acres' Kineopticon; and the Biograph, which was marketed by the American Mutoscope Company. The premiere of the Vitascope was a quick response to threat of losing a very large amount of money to the Lumiere Cinematographe, which vaudeville managers were about to invest in. Even though the Lumiere Cinematographe existed since 1895, it had not gained popularity in the US yet, as it had already in the UK. People were going crazy for the Lumiere Cinematographe especially in London.[2] Raff and Gammon recognized that they would get more money and positive exposure by releasing their technology ahead of the Lumiere Cinematographe in the United States.[4] After the Vitascope made its infamous debut in Manhattan, the device was distributed across the nation including exhibitions in Boston, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Portland, Scranton, New Haven, New Orleans, New London, Cleveland, Buffalo, San Francisco, Asbury Park, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and more. The Vitascope's exhibition made its way across 25 cities in one summer.[2][4]
The Vitascope, along with many of the competing projectors, became a popular attraction in variety and vaudeville theaters in cities across the US. Motion pictures soon became starring attractions on the vaudeville bill. Exhibitors could exhibit films from the Edison inventory.[citation needed]
The Edison Company developed its own projector known as the Projectoscope or Projecting Kinetoscope in November 1896, and abandoned marketing the Vitascope.[citation needed]
Marketing
Thomas Edison and Thomas Armat profited greatly while many investors defaulted, even ending up in the red in some cases. Investors lost money on the Vitascope because of how it was marketed for audiences.[2] Raff and Gammon were in charge of franchising in the US and Canada. They would offer investors the opportunity to buy out the rights to use the Vitascope exclusively in their state. This created somewhat of a monopoly effect for a short time and essentially forced audiences to take whatever the exhibitor was giving them. Raff & Gammon put the cart before the horse when they began their marketing campaign. At the time they only had approximately 20 films for Vaudeville managers to use. They did not have the resources to continually update the audience’s cinematic experience with new films.[4]
The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographecode: fra promoted to code: fr motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was a British inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
The following is an overview of the events of 1895 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The following is an overview of the events of 1896 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in New Jersey also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.
Charles Francis Jenkins was an American engineer who was a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies. His businesses included Charles Jenkins Laboratories and Jenkins Television Corporation. Over 400 patents were issued to Jenkins, many for his inventions related to motion pictures and television.
Thomas J. Armat was an American mechanic and inventor, a pioneer of cinema best known through the co-invention of the Edison Vitascope.
Cinematograph or kinematograph is an early term for several types of motion picture film mechanisms. The name was used for movie cameras as well as film projectors, or for complete systems that also provided means to print films.
The Black Maria was Thomas Edison's film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It was the world's first film studio.
Actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that, like documentary film, uses footage of real events, places, and things. Unlike documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger narrative or coherent whole. In practice, actuality films preceded the emergence of the documentary. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not as sharply drawn in early cinema as it would be after documentaries came to serve as the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. Actuality is a film genre that remains strongly related to still photography.
The Eidoloscope was an early motion picture system created by Eugene Augustin Lauste, Woodville Latham and his two sons through their business, the Lambda Company, in New York City in 1894 and 1895. The Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on April 21, 1895, and opened to the paying public on Broadway on May 20.
Herman Casler was an American inventor and co-founder of the partnership called the K.M.C.D. Syndicate, along with W.K-L. Dickson, Elias Koopman, and Henry Marvin, which eventually was incorporated into the American Mutoscope Company in December 1895.
The decade of the 1890s in film involved some significant events.
The Latham Loop is used in film projection and image capture. It isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods.
Koster and Bial's Music Hall was an important vaudeville theatre in New York City, located at Broadway and Thirty-Fourth Street, where Macy's flagship store now stands. It had a seating capacity of 3,748, twice the size of many theaters. Ticket prices ranged from 25¢ for a seat in the gallery to $1.50 for one in the orchestra. The venue was founded by John Koster (1844-1895) and Albert Bial (1842-1897) in the late 19th century and closed in 1901.
The Phantoscope was a film projection machine, a creation of Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. In the early 1890, Jenkins began creating the projector. He later met Thomas Armat, who provided financial backing and assisted with necessary modifications.
The history of film technology traces the development of techniques for the recording, construction and presentation of motion pictures. When the film medium came about in the 19th century, there already was a centuries old tradition of screening moving images through shadow play and the magic lantern that were very popular with audiences in many parts of the world. Especially the magic lantern influenced much of the projection technology, exhibition practices and cultural implementation of film. Between 1825 and 1840, the relevant technologies of stroboscopic animation, photography and stereoscopy were introduced. For much of the rest of the century, many engineers and inventors tried to combine all these new technologies and the much older technique of projection to create a complete illusion or a complete documentation of reality. Colour photography was usually included in these ambitions and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings. Between 1887 and 1894, the first successful short cinematographic presentations were established. The biggest popular breakthrough of the technology came in 1895 with the first projected movies that lasted longer than 10 seconds. During the first years after this breakthrough, most motion pictures lasted about 50 seconds, lacked synchronized sound and natural colour, and were mainly exhibited as novelty attractions. In the first decades of the 20th century, movies grew much longer and the medium quickly developed into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment. The breakthrough of synchronized sound occurred at the end of the 1920s and that of full color motion picture film in the 1930s. By the start of the 21st century, physical film stock was being replaced with digital film technologies at both ends of the production chain by digital image sensors and projectors.
Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon were two American businessmen who were known for distributing and promoting some of the Edison Studio films, and founding their own business, which was called The Kinetoscope Company.
References
↑ Lathrop, George P. "Stage Scenery and the Vitascope." The North American Review 163.478 (1896): 377-381. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2014.
1 2 3 4 5 Musser, Charles (1994). "The Vitascope". The Emergence of Cinema: The American Cinema to 1907 1.1 109-132. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
1 2 3 Allen, Robert C. "Vitascope/Cinématographe: Initial Patterns of American Film Industrial Practice." Journal of the University Film Association 31.2 (1979): 13-18. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2014.
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