"We'll try it and it will lead to other things."
Over the next five years, Laurie Dickson worked to create the Kinetograph to record images and the Kinetoscope to screen them. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey notes:
"While Edison provided the resources, the vision for the invention, and the electromechanical knowledge used in designing motion picture devices, Dickson provided most of the knowledge of photography that those inventions drew on."
The scene was set for another decade of experimentation, legal disputes, patent fights, mysterious deaths and corporate bullying.
Roll-film patent holder David Houston arrived at George Eastman's office in Rochester. He was unhappy with the original license fees that Kodak had paid, and eventually settled with Eastman to 'buy him out root and branch' for $75,000 ($2m in today's terms). Eastman then paid out textile baron Darius Goff, who owned the patent for perforated film stock and acquired Samuel Turner's daylight-loading patent.
Film historian Mark Cousins describes the invention of filmmaking as:
"...a shambolic race."
In October 1888, Louis Aime Augustin le Prince set up his ‘Receiver’ camera in the backyard of a family home in Roundhay, Leeds. He loaded it with non-perforated film and directed his 'subjects' to walk in a circle. The images that he recorded survive as the Roundhay Garden Scene. The first moving picture made. le Prince spent the winter months building his ‘Deliverer’ projector with three lenses and three belts.
Photographic milestones and inventions began to overlap and leapfrog each other in quick succession. By 1882 Étienne Jules Marey had created a revolving disc camera with glass plates. He showed 40 sequential images at the Academie des Sciences in Paris:
"This method enables me to obtain the successive impressions of a man or of an animal in motion while avoiding the necessity of operating in front of a black background."
Fellow Frenchman Charles-Emile Reynaud built another way to screen images to an audience.
He took a child’s toy called the Praxinoscope and with modification turned it into a public projection system. The Théâtre Optique (below) is significant. Film historian Deac Rossell states its importance in the timeline of invention:
"...a significant and successful example of a moving picture apparatus using a continuously-running image band and an optical intermittent system"
After a decade manufacturing and selling glass photo plates, John Carbutt decided to experiment and reached out to the Hyatt’s Celluloid Manufacturing Company.
He ordered several thin sheets of their celluloid product. Carbutt coated them with his own dry plate emulsion and after a period of research, Carbutt presented his new product to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1888:
"...flexible negative films, the most complete and perfect substitute for glass I believe yet discovered on which to make negatives and positives."
While sheets of celluloid coated with emulsion were not unique, Carbutt’s product was the first commercial use of celluloid as a substitute for glass. The British photographer Colonel James Waterhouse, Assistant Surveyor-General of India noted:
"It has been reserved for our practical-minded Transatlantic cousins to be the first to show the way and to produce the flat transparent films which can be handled and treated in the same way as glass plates, but without their liability to fracture and their excessive weight and bulk."
Celluloid was far more portable than its glass plate predecessor and created the catalyst for amateur photography worldwide. He told the American Photographic Convention in Boston:
"The advantage of the celluloid film over the glass, I think, will be appreciated before long by the professional photographer."
Carbutt’s celluloid sheet film proved to be the key to building a device that was able to expose images in rapid succession. A movie camera.
Edison's assistant Laurie Dickson (far left) had already used raw samples from the Hyatt’s Celluloid Manufacturing Company, in nearby Newark, but:
"...it was heavy and stiff, making it difficult to handle and resistant of being bent or rolled into a coil."
Dickson needed a medium that was flexible enough to wrap around the cylinder that was intended to expose and store their prototype camera's images. He tested celluloid from Carbutt and other companies but soon encountered problems. The celluloid was sticking in the prototype camera.
Dickson wandered around the labs that housed Edison's previous inventions and found inspiration from the perforated paper of an automatic telegraph machine.
Within a week he had created a perforator that made two round holes in each film picture. The addition of sprockets gave them reliable exposure in camera and steady projection in the viewing machine.
"In less than a month, we had a good working camera."
At this point, the work of Carbutt, Edison, Goodwin and Eastman crossover.
Eastman had acquired Houston’s film-roll patent outright and wanted to finalize the film stock for the planned Kodak consumer camera. His chemist Henry Reichenbach experimented with ways to deliver a clear flexible film, capable of holding emulsion that was also resistant to stretching and folding.
Eastman and Reichenbach settled on a formula, and filed for patent protection but were rejected. Eastman withdrew the application but Reichenbach made changes to the patent and filed again, by himself. He specified the need for camphor in the flexible film mix.and the patent was approved.
Eastman launched the Kodak camera. For the first time, an easy to use camera with pre-loaded film was sold to amateurs and professionals alike. After exposing the images, buyers simply returned it to Eastman for processing and printing.
“Anybody who can wind a watch can use the Kodak camera.”
“You press the button, we do the rest.”
Samples of the Kodak film were displayed at the New York Camera Club's next meeting which Edison's engineer Laurie Dickson attended. He later wrote for the Society of Motion Picture Engineers:
"All these samples and experiments were made for us exclusively by Mr Eastman. Who took an ever-increasing interest in what we were doing."
Dickson experimented with joining strips of exposed celluloid together.
"...we had to devise certain essentials; such as a circular film cutter or trimmer, a perforator and a clamp with steady pins to fit the punch holes, to use in joining the film with a thin paste of the base dissolved in amyl acetate..."
One of the first examples of celluloid film editing.
Historians believe that Edison's doubt in the Kinetoscope grew, while Dickson realized the greater potential of moving pictures. Edison appears to have only ever considered the visual projection device to be an accessory to his successful sound Phonograph. Professor Peter Bauland, University of Michigan:
"Edison was primarily a tinkerer and businessman. It never occurred to him that movies could be art, and he originally had no idea for theatrical exhibition. With the kinetoscope, he really envisioned the VCR, the movie you watch by yourself."
Meanwhile, Reverend Goodwin, the amateur photographer who had invented a celluloid film in his attic, had missed a critical patent office grace period, which