Historian Paul Spehr believes that Edison was:
"...uncertain about the long-term market for the Kinetoscope...he was skeptical about what would happen after the novelty wore off."
Frustrated with the lack of progress on the Kinetograph, and Edison's general disinterest, Laurie Dickson spoke to fellow engineer Harry N. Marvin about making a small photographic device that could record, then show: “...just the knockout punch of a prize fight”.
Dickson showed Marvin a prototype pack of cards with sequential images that when flicked, imitated motion. Marvin shared Dickson’s sketches and cards with his friend Herman Casler, with whom both had previously worked with to create the Photoret- “a detective spy camera”.
Casler built a new photo device:
"...for exhibiting consecutively-taken pictures of objects in motion, to which I have applied the name “mutoscope”."
To avoid Edison suing them for patent infringement, the Marvin & Casler Company was then formed to make the Mutoscope for peep shows. At first, Dickson helped Marvin and Casler informally, then the three partners enlisted Elias Koopman, who had helped sell the Photoret, to lead with sales and marketing of the Mutoscope.
The Latham family in New York, who were peepshow exhibitors, were frustrated that Edison's Kinetoscope had not shipped and began work on their own projection device. It was to contain a simple, pivotal innovation.
The Latham's reached out to Laurie Dickson for advice.
Meanwhile, Charles Jenkins had built a 'better Kinetoscope', in his spare time, which he said was for:
'...the recording and reproduction of action'
Friends, fellow-boarders, and colleagues across Washington D.C. tested and trialed the device. Some even posed for Jenkins so he could photograph their diving, swimming and jumping actions. Jenkins wrote to the legendary inventor Alexander Graham Bell to seek funding for the device that he called Phenakistascope. Bell saw an immediate application for the device beyond cinema audiences - to create photographs of talking lips to assist in teaching the deaf. Bell encouraged Jenkins to continue with his 'simply ingenious mechanism'.
Jenkins then landed James Freeman as an investor/engineer and the two men started work on a new projection device, called the Phantoscope - a name used for all future devices. Jenkins believed that a consistent brand was a key element in his future success.
Around the same time, Ottomar Anschütz showed his Electrotachyscope, which presented the illusion of motion using serial photographs arranged on a spinning wheel, much like Dickson's pack of cards prototype, at the Chicago World's Fair. The device made an impression on Thomas Armat, a young man in the audience who was determined to become an inventor.
Armat soon teamed up with Jenkins in business.
After years of delays, Kinetoscopes began to appear around the world, first at the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, New York then in Mexico and Stockholm. Five machines were bought by the MacMahon brothers screened films at the Haunted Swing Premises on Bourke Street in Melbourne, Australia.
In Europe, pioneering brothers pursued their visions.
Emil and Max Skladanowsky (above) progressed from making a basic film camera to a projector called the Bioskop that used two loops of 54mm film, one frame being projected alternately from each. This made it possible for the Bioscop to project at 16 frames per second, a speed sufficient to create the illusion of movement. The brothers worked through 1893 and 1894 making films to project.
It became apparent during that Thomas Edison had made a business mistake. He had not patented the Kinetoscope outside the US, which allowed anyone to make their own 35 mm viewer and cameras without fear of litigation. When Charles-Antoine Lumière met with his son Louis, and company engineer Eugene Moisson in 1894, he was holding a sample of film that he had received from an Edison Studios agent.
'This is what you should make because Edison sells it at insane prices."
The opportunity was two-fold. To build a 35 mm camera to shoot films and a 35 mm projector to screen them. An accomplished engineer in his own right, Louis Lumière visited fellow Parisian inventor Georges Demenÿ at the Villa Chaptal and viewed the devices he had produced.
Demenÿ had designed an intermittent projection method using a pair of claws, and a large projector apparatus but Lumière decided not to engage with him.
The paper based film stock that Lumière used for his prototype was not robust enough for his machinery nor sufficient for exposure, so he reached out to the Hyatt's Celluloid Company for celluloid roll film. When their base stock did not work, Lumiere tried samples from Eastman-Kodak and Thomas Blair.
Reliable, robust flexible film was still a problem that needed solving before motion pictures could advance.
After Edison's Kinetoscope was officially launched in London, two London film exhibitors approached Robert W. Paul, an electrical engineer, to exploit the patent loop-hole and make a 'Kinetoscope-clone'. They had six genuine Edison machines but needed six more to satisfy audience demand.
Paul had a local manufacture reverse-engineer the Kinetoscope and build replicas, called Theatrographs. Then Paul discovered that his clients had no films to project because Edison controlled the market by only supplying films to operators of authentic machines. He needed a filmmaker.
A friend introduced him to Birt Acres, the English photographer, and inventor, who seemed to be an ideal candidate. Already a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Acres had devised a lantern slide system that could project a series of photographs in sequence creating the impression of motion. The two men agreed to make several short film titles.
In Paris, Charles Pathé had been successful in selling Edison's phonograph devices when he too realized that the US inventor had failed to patent his projection machines in Europe. Pathé bought several Kinetoscope-clones from Robert Paul, then looked for an engineer to build 35 mm cameras that he could use to make film titles.
Henri Joly had performed as a gymnast before Demenÿ's Phonoscope cameras and then persisted with his interest in engineering and photography. He met Pathé and convinced him that he could build a 35 mm camera.
Meanwhile, the American inventor Charles Jenkins had refined his imaging device so that it was able to project a larger image to an audience. He set up the Phantoscope (below) in June 1894 for an audience that included his parents, friends, and reporters from The Photographic Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Richmond Telegram who wrote:
"As the last arc ceased to sputter and the window-shades rolled up, the people began to ask one another what they had seen. It was not certainly clear.
Although there had been the gesticulating girl ... from where had she come? How did she move? The viewers went behind the screen to impress the wall and ascertain there was no trickery, for there were no words to express it.”
Jenkins biographer Donald Godfrey:
"The film began rolling and life-sized images appeared depicting a dancing girl dressed in a butterfly costume. She danced across the screen to the amazement of the audience. As the ballerina lifted her skirt, to bow at the end of the performance, she revealed her ankle, and the ladies in the audience, all Quakers, stormed out of the store in protest over such a display of nudity. They went directly to the Church to pray for Jenkins soul. The men in the