History often credits a handful of enterprising individuals with developing the new technologies that lead to new categories of mass media. Such innovations, however, are usually the result of simultaneous investigations by numerous people. In addition, the innovations of both known and unknown inventors are propelled by economic and social forces as well as by individual abilities.4

The Development of Film

The concept of film goes back as early as Leonardo da Vinci, who theorized in the late fifteenth century about creating a device that would reproduce reality. Other early precursors to film included the Magic Lantern developed in the seventeenth century, which projected images painted on glass plates using an oil lamp as a light source; the thaumatrope invented in 1824, a two-sided card with different images on each side that appeared to combine the images when twirled; and the zoetrope introduced in 1834, a cylindrical device that rapidly twirled images inside a cylinder, which appeared to make the images move.

Muybridge and Goodwin Make Pictures Move

The development stage of movies began when inventors started manipulating photographs to make them appear to move while simultaneously projecting them onto a screen. Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer living in America, is credited with being the first to do both. He studied motion by using multiple cameras to take successive photographs of humans and animals in motion. One of Muybridge’s first projects involved using photography to determine if a racehorse actually lifts all four feet from the ground at full gallop (it does). By 1880, Muybridge had developed a method for projecting the photographic images onto a wall for public viewing. These early image sequences were extremely brief, showing only a horse jumping over a fence or a man running a few feet, because only so many photographs could be mounted inside the spinning cylinder that projected the images.

Meanwhile, other inventors were also working on capturing moving images and projecting them. In 1884, George Eastman (founder of Eastman Kodak) developed the first roll film—a huge improvement over the heavy metal and glass plates used to make individual photos. The first roll film had a paper backing that had to be stripped off during the film developing stage. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, a Frenchman living in England, invented the first motion picture camera using roll film. Le Prince, who disappeared mysteriously on a train ride to Paris in 1890, is credited with filming the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene, in 1888. About two seconds’ worth of the film survives today.

In 1889, a New Jersey minister, Hannibal Goodwin, improved Eastman’s roll film by using thin strips of transparent, pliable material called celluloid, which could hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light. Goodwin’s breakthrough solved a major problem: It enabled a strip of film to move through a camera and be photographed in rapid succession, producing a series of pictures. Because celluloid was transparent (except for the images made on it during filming), it was ideal for projection, as light could easily shine through it. George Eastman, who also announced the development of celluloid film, legally battled Goodwin for years over the patent rights. The courts eventually awarded Goodwin the invention, but Eastman’s company became the major manufacturer of film stock for motion pictures after buying Goodwin’s patents.

Edison and the Lumières Create Motion Pictures

As with the development of sound recording, Thomas Edison takes center stage in most accounts of the invention of motion pictures. In the late 1800s, Edison initially planned to merge phonograph technology and moving images to create talking pictures (which would not happen in feature films until 1927). Because there was no breakthrough, however, Edison lost interest. He directed an assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, to combine Edison’s incandescent lightbulb, Goodwin’s celluloid, and Le Prince’s camera to create another early movie camera, the kinetograph, and a single-person viewing system, the kinetoscope. This small projection system housed fifty feet of film that revolved on spools (similar to a library microfilm reader). Viewers looked through a hole and saw images moving on a tiny plate. In 1894, the first kinetoscope parlor, featuring two rows of coin-operated machines, opened on Broadway in New York.

Meanwhile, in France, brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière developed the cinematograph, a combined camera, film developer, and projection system. The projection system was particularly important, as it allowed more than one person at a time to see the moving images on a large screen. In a Paris café on December 28, 1895, the Lumières projected ten short movies for viewers who paid one franc each, on such subjects as a man falling off a horse and a child trying to grab a fish from a bowl. Within three weeks, twenty-five hundred people were coming each night to see how, according to one Paris paper, film “perpetuates the image of movement.”

With innovators around the world now dabbling in moving pictures, Edison’s lab renewed its interest in film. Edison patented several inventions and manufactured a new large-screen system called the vitascope, which enabled filmstrips of longer lengths to be projected without interruption and hinted at the potential of movies as a future mass medium. Staged at a music hall in New York in April 1896, Edison’s first public showing of the vitascope featured shots from a boxing match and waves rolling onto a beach. The New York Times described the exhibition as “wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating.” Some members of the audience were so taken with the realism of the film images that they stepped back from the screen’s crashing waves to avoid getting their feet wet.

Early movie demonstrations such as these marked the beginning of the film industry’s entrepreneurial stage. At this point, movies consisted of movement recorded by a single continuous camera shot. Early filmmakers had not yet figured out how to move the camera around or how to edit film shots together. Nonetheless, various innovators were beginning to see the commercial possibilities of film. By 1900, short movies had become a part of the entertainment industry and were showing up in amusement arcades, traveling carnivals, wax museums, and vaudeville theater.

The Introduction of Narrative

The shift to the mass medium stage for movies occurred with the introduction of narrative films: movies that tell stories. Audiences quickly tired of static films of waves breaking on beaches or vaudeville acts recorded by immobile cameras. To become a mass medium, the early silent films had to offer what books achieved: the suspension of disbelief. They had to create narrative worlds that engaged an audience’s imagination.

Some of the earliest narrative films were produced and directed by French magician and inventor Georges Méliès, who opened the first public movie theater in France in 1896. Méliès may have been the first director to realize that a movie was not simply a means of recording reality. He understood that a movie could be artificially planned and controlled like a staged play. Méliès began producing short fantasy and fairy-tale films—including The Vanishing Lady (1896), Cinderella (1899), and A Trip to the Moon (1902)—by increasingly using editing and existing camera tricks and techniques, such as slow motion and cartoon animation, which became key ingredients in future narrative filmmaking.

The first American filmmaker to adapt Méliès’s innovations to narrative film was Edwin S. Porter. A cameraman who had studied Méliès’s work in an Edison lab, Porter mastered the technique of editing diverse shots together to tell a coherent story. Porter shot narrative scenes out of order (for instance, some in a studio and some outdoors) and reassembled, or edited, them to make a story. In 1902, he made what is regarded as America’s first narrative film, The Life of an American Fireman. It also contained the first close-up shot in U.S. narrative film history—a ringing fire alarm. Until then, moviemakers thought close-ups cheated the audience of the opportunity to see an entire scene. Porter’s most important film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), introduced the western genre as well as chase scenes. In this popular eleven-minute movie, which inspired many copycats, Porter demonstrated the art of film suspense by alternating shots of the robbers with those of a posse in hot pursuit.

The Arrival of Nickelodeons

Another major development in the evolution of film as a mass medium was the arrival of nickelodeons—a form of movie theater whose name combines the admission price with the Greek word for “theater.” According to media historian Douglas Gomery, these small and uncomfortable makeshift theaters were often converted storefronts redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters: “In front, large, hand-painted posters announced the movies for the day. Inside, the screening of news, documentary, comedy, fantasy, and dramatic shorts lasted about one hour.”5 Usually a piano player added live music, and sometimes theater operators used sound effects to simulate gunshots or loud crashes. Because they showed silent films that transcended language barriers, nickelodeons flourished during the great European immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. These theaters filled a need for many newly arrived people struggling to learn English and seeking an inexpensive escape from the hard life of the city. Often managed by immigrants, nickelodeons required a minimal investment: just a secondhand projector and a large white sheet. Between 1907 and 1909, the number of nickelodeons grew from five thousand to ten thousand. The craze peaked by 1910, when entrepreneurs began to seek more affluent spectators, attracting them with larger and more lavish movie theaters.