Today in Technology History
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August 31
On August 31, 1897, Thomas Alva Edison obtained a patent for a motion picture camera.
Edison (1847-1931), the American who invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph, had been experimenting with moving-picture technology for more than a decade. Edison was determined, as he put it, to do "for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear."
Edison had actually invented and built his motion picture camera by 1891 -- in fact, he had opened the world's first motion picture studio in 1893 -- but it took six years for the patent to be approved. His kinetographic camera was remarkably similar to today's film movie cameras: it used photographic film which moved past a camera lens, producing images which gave the illusion of motion.
However, today's motion picture film is transparent, since it is intended to be projected on a screen and viewed by large audiences. Edison's kinetographic camera produced pictures that had to be viewed through the peephole of a device called a kinetoscope; they could, therefore, only be watched by a few people simultaneously.
Edison understood that the illusion of motion depended upon images changing faster than the eye could see: "There should be at least enough [frames per second] so that the eye of an observer cannot distinguish, or at least cannot clearly and positively distinguish at a glance a difference in the position occupied by the object in the successive figures. A less speed in taking the pictures will cause a trembling or jerky appearance in the produced picture."
Related links:
Click here to read more about Edison's kinetographic camera (although this page mistakenly gives the year of his patent as 1887).
To read about the first motion picture studio, which Edison founded in 1893, click here.
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