Audio
(ENG) Kinetoscope (307)
Transcript
NARRATOR— The video display nearby shows clips from the first experimental films at the West Orange lab. One brief clip from 1891 features an athlete juggling Indian clubs. He’s standing more or less where you are now. Edison’s mucker William Dickson, and his assistant, Charles Brown, worked here, in one of the partitioned laboratory rooms that ran along this side of the machine shop. Their job was to develop an invention that Edison named the “kinetoscope.”
BERNIE CARLSON— The kinetoscope began with an extraordinary idea in Edison’s mind. Why not make a machine that did for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear? … Edison thought that it would be most profitable if he made a machine that could be only used by one viewer at a time. What he called a “nickel in the slot” machine. Once he had the idea for the kinetoscope, Edison then picked one of his muckers, William K.L. Dickson, to run the project.
BERNIE CARLSON—Dickson decided that what he wanted to do was to take advantage of a series of stop-action slides, and to project those so that people could look at them as a group. Dickson went on to build a machine along these lines, and he showed it to Edison. And in its first film, it showed Dickson approaching the camera, raising his hat, and saying hello to Edison. … Edison took one look at this machine that Dickson had produced, and he rejected it. Basically, Edison rejected it because he didn’t want a projector. What he wanted was some sort of peep-show machine that people could look at, and view one person at a time. … These peep-show machines were a big success in penny arcades, and in particular, at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The kinetoscope episode, then, illustrates how for Edison, invention meant not only getting the device right, but also keeping focused on a viable market strategy.
Description
English audio guide for Kinetoscope, #307
Date Created
01/01/2007
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