The Wizard of Menlo Park by Randall E. Stross

Author:Randall E. Stross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307394569
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Even before others had found a way to earn profits from recorded music, Edison had begun thinking about a machine that did more. The “Kinetoscope Moving View” would do “for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.” The first version was modeled on Edison’s phonograph, and was rather too ambitious, attempting to provide not only images but synchronized sound. This very early progenitor of modern cinema—only one of many that tinkerers around the world were working on—did not come close to resembling the machine that would cast mesmerizing images that filled large screens, for it was conceived on a microscopic scale. One cylinder was used to play back sound and a second one to provide visuals with thousands of tiny images, each taken as an individual photograph by a conventional camera and painstakingly mounted on the cylinder, one by one. They were arranged in a spiral so that they could be viewed continuously through a microscope. In theory, it was a clever arrangement; in practice, however, it was impossible to make the images lie flat and appear clearly.

Edison did not have time to work out solutions to the problems as he had done when the incandescent light was his top priority. He conceived of the kinetoscope just as he decided that ore milling was going to be his main project. Edison reassigned one of his principal assistants at the mine, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, whom Edison knew was also a talented photographer, to head up work on the kinetoscope. It was Dickson who would advance the project with myriad contributions—and continue to do so after he parted with Edison on less-than-amicable terms in 1895 and put his talents and experience to work for competitors.

No one had yet figured out how to rapidly open and close the camera’s shutter—dozens of times a second—while capturing crisp images on film that was in constant motion. A much improved camera was invented, but not by Edison or his assistants. Etienne-Jules Marey, the same distinguished French scientist who earlier had worked on recording human vocalization, had designed an ingenious camera: It recorded sixty images a second on a long continuous strip of film, which was pulled by a cam in a deliberatively jerky fashion to stop the film momentarily, so that light could saturate the film and capture motion. Not only had Marey made these crucial advances, he was happy to share what he had learned with the scientific community. When Edison visited Paris in 1889 for the Paris Exposition, he was cordially received by Marey and was presented with a copy of Marey’s book, which detailed in French his recent photographic work. Dickson, who had remained back at the laboratory in New Jersey but was fluent in French, likely had learned of Marey’s most recent work by reading French periodicals that he bought for the laboratory.

In Dickson’s account of the events of that year, Edison does not play much more than an honorific role. While Edison was in Paris, Dickson readied a

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