Today in Technology History
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March 26
On March 26, 1895, the first motion picture projector was granted a patent.
A view of the insides of the Phantoscope projector, taken from the patent. Click the image above to see the entire patent. The "Phantoscope" projector was invented by Charles Francis Jenkins, a resident of Indiana who had a government job in Washington, D.C. At the time, motion pictures were generally played in special viewing devices, cranked by hand or motor, which allowed only a small number of people to simultaneously watch a movie.
Jenkins turned that idea inside-out: instead of peering into a box to watch a motion picture, you could use a box with a light in it to put motion pictures into plain sight. As Jenkins put it, the "picture-carrying light is projected."
The patent for the Phantoscope is as bare-bones as a movie projector can get: an electric lamp, a lens, a drum for feeding the film and a few gears. "Any suitable motor" could be used to move the film.
Jenkins and a collaborator, Thomas Armat, made improvements to the Phantoscope. They publicly demonstrated the device several times in 1895, then went their separate ways. Armat approached various companies, and in 1896 a company owned by Thomas Edison began to manufacture the movie projector under the name "Vitascope."
Of course, the projector would have been impossible were it not for the innovations in film technology which came out of the Eastman company in Rochester, New York. (Coincidentally, the Eastman company first manufactured motion picture film exactly ten years before the Phantoscope patent, on March 26, 1885.) With Eastman's film technology and Jenkins's projector technology, motion pictures became attractions fit for big audiences, instead of curiosities for just a handful of spectators.
Related links:
Click here to read about the Phantoscope, the Vitascope, Jenkins and Armat.
Click here to read about the contributions to projector technology made by Edison.
We wrote about George Eastman, founder of the Eastman company, last year. We have also written about Thomas Edison's invention of a motion picture camera and about how Edison opened the world's first motion picture studio.
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