Made In America - Bill Bryson [161]
Never mind. Sales soared.
15
The Movies
In 1877, in one of those instances of one thing leading to another, the railway tycoon Leland Stanford and a business crony were lounging with drinks on the veranda of Stanford’s California stud farm when the conversation turned to the question of whether a galloping horse ever has all four hoofs off the ground at once. Stanford was so sure that it did – or possibly didn’t; history is unclear on this point – that he laid his friend a bet of $25,000. The difficulty was that no matter how carefully you watch the legs of a galloping horse you cannot tell (particularly, we might suppose, when you have had a number of drinks on the veranda) whether the horse is at any point momentarily suspended in air. Determined to find an answer, Stanford called in his chief engineer, John D. Isaacs, who in turn summoned the services of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Muybridge was a self-created exotic (his real name was the rather more plebeian Edward Muggeridge) and an accomplished landscape photographer, though in 1877 his fame rested chiefly on having managed to get himself acquitted of murdering his wife’s lover in one of the more sensational cases of the age. Isaacs and Muybridge deployed twenty-four cameras along a racetrack and with the aid of trip-wires executed a series of photographs of a horse galloping past. This had two effects. It proved beyond question that a galloping horse does get all four hoofs off the ground, and for quite a lot of the time, and it marked the beginning of motion picture photography.1
Motion pictures of a type had been around since the late eighteenth century. Usually they involved cut-out silhouettes, pictures painted on discs or cylinders or some other such simple device, which could be back-lit and spun to throw a moving image on to a wall or screen. Despite their primitiveness these early devices went by a variety of scientifically impressive names: the phenakistoscope, the animatoscope, the thaumatrope, the phantascope, the stroboscope. Inspired by their linguistic inventiveness, Muybridge constructed a projector of his own and called it a zoopraxiscope. Soon other similar devices were flooding the market: the mutascope, the kinematoscope, the kinematograph, the theatrograph.
All of these had certain deficiencies, primarily that they relied on stringing together sequences of still photographs, a process that required either a lot of cameras or careful orchestration of movements on the part of the subjects. What was really needed was moving film. Thomas Edison saw himself as the man to provide it – or at least as the man to provide the man to provide it. He gave the task to a young Scotsman in his employ named W. K. L. Dickson. Dickson (who would later go on to found Biograph, one of the first Hollywood studios) studied the competitors’ machines, considered the problem, and in short order devised an entire motion picture system, the first in the world (which perhaps makes him the true father of the movies). The camera was called a kinetograph, the projection device a kinetoscope, and the films thus made were kinetophones. (I mention them specifically because books of film history sometimes confuse them.) Nothing that Dickson came up with was particularly new. He essentially put together, albeit in an ingenious way, existing technologies.
Edison didn’t envision kinetophone viewing as a shared, public experience, but rather as a home entertainment system – and one whose primary purpose would be to provide an extra, incidental use for his recently invented phonograph. Some of the early motion pictures even had sound. (What slowed the progress of sound movies wasn’t the problem of synchronization but of amplification.) He suspected the whole thing would prove a passing fad, and had so little confidence in it that he decided against spending $150 on an international patent, to his huge eventual cost.2
The first public demonstration of Dickson’s new system was on 14 April 1894, on Broadway in New York. Despite