Screendollars Newsletter 2021-04-26.Pdf
Monday, April 26, 2021 | No. 165 One of the things moviegoers like most about going to theatres is seeing films on the Big Screen, "the way they were meant to be seen." What people don't realize is that when films started in the mid-1890s, there were neither screens nor projectors. The very short films of that era were meant to be seen individually by looking into peep show machines in arcades. Those Kinetoscope devices were one of many inventions from Thomas Edison's factory in West Orange, NJ. Since Edison was monetizing his Kinetoscopes quite well, he had no interest in developing a machine to project film images on walls. Others, however, saw a big future in showing films to groups of people. Peep show owners, in fact, were very vocal in pressing Edison to devise a Film projection to large audiences was much more way to show life size images on arcade walls. This led to the Vitascope profitable than viewing through individual kiosks, since projection system, developed by Washington, DC inventor Thomas Armat, fewer machines were needed in proportion to the but then marketed by Edison's organization as if it were his own invention. number of viewers - Click to Play The first public Vitascope screening took place April 23, 1896 at Koster & Biel's Music Hall, a vaudeville house in New York's Herald Square at 34th Street near Broadway, the site today of Macy's. It would have premiered three days earlier, but it took longer than expected to install the machinery. That first night audience was dazzled by film images projected on a 20 foot canvas screen set within a gilded frame.
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