Although the interest in “motion pictures” dates back hundreds of years, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the American people began to focus on advancing the visual art of film. DIfferent methods of image projection served as the rudimentary foundations of motion picture entertainment, and they advanced rapidly throughout the 1800s. Innovators such as Thomas Edison and Eadweard Muybridge began building off of image-projecting technologies to create the roots of America’s film industry.
The history of the “motion picture” as we know it begins with photographer and entrepreneur Eadweard Muybridge in California in the late 19th century. He used timed exposures of photos of racehorses to capture the different stages of a horse’s gallop and placed them on a projector to simulate motion. He traveled with his creation in hopes of advancing his invention, and he eventually met with Thomas Edison at one of his shows. During this time, Edison and Muybridge worked together while trying to discover a way to set these moving images to sound from Edison’s phonograph. Soon after their meeting, Edison set out to create an even better camera that could capture more images, and eventually created the kinetograph and the kinetoscope.
By the turn of the century, it was evident that the film industry was s profitable enterprise. Many early films contained little to no story line, such as Edison’s The Kiss and The Sneeze. Later, when the ability to pan a camera was born, cinema company and top Edison competitor, Biograph incorporated these techniques into their films. Other early Biograph films were mostly documentary shorts, boxing films, or crude race-based comedy shorts. Edison then went on to create somewhat melodramatic story films and burlesque shorts, causing Edison to expand his ranges of subject matter and eventually merge with nine of his competitors, Biograph