Photographic History Collection: Early Cinema: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

The Photographic History Collection’s Early Motion Picture History Collection is one of the most complete assemblages of objects relating to the invention of the American cinema in any museum. The collection has been acquired over 110 years, starting with a donation by pioneer C. Francis Jenkins in 1898. Notable accessions have included Gatewood Dunston’s donation of 58 projectors, 217 glass theater slides, and other materials, and Eugene Augustin Lauste’s donation of machines and materials documenting his sound-on-film work. The objects cover the range of technological innovation and popular appeal that defined the motion picture industry during a period in which it became the premier form of mass communication in American life.

This survey of the Early Motion Picture Collection was restricted to a definition of that term that only includes items related to the filming, editing, and exhibition of motion pictures to mass audiences in the period from 1885-1930. The collection includes 32 motion picture cameras, 105 projectors, including the first ever made in America, over 120 pieces of miscellaneous editing, sound, and other apparatus, over 50 pieces of notable motion picture film, and more than 70 posters, photographs, and other ephemera from cinema’s early days. Purposefully excluded were objects classified as or relating to optical toys, high-speed or motion capture still photography, magic lantern slides and apparatus, amateur/home motion picture photography, and film and projectors for educational use. When it appeared that an object could have had dual use or there was some ambiguity about its original purpose and it might have fit the definition of this collection, it was included.

The history of the American cinema can be told through the collection’s objects and their inventors, with few notable omissions. Beginning in the 1880s, a number of Americans worked to combine the “persistence of vision” motion of optical toys, the projection power of the popular magic lantern, and advances in motion-capture photography to create the photographic moving image.

By 1892, Edison employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson had created a working model of a camera to record motion pictures on celluloid film, and a viewing machine called the Kinetoscope which was used for the first exhibition of movies in America in 1894. Meanwhile, others, including Otway and Grey Latham, Thomas Armat, C. Francis Jenkins, and E. H. Amet, realized the potential of the new media and worked to invent machines that would project the moving image on a screen for an audience. Though projection became the dominant form of motion picture exhibition by 1900, a group of individuals, Dickson, Herman Casler, Henry Marvin, and Elias Koopman, patented the mutoscope in 1895. This single-viewer movie machine, which operated on the principle of a flip-book, competed directly with Edison’s Kinetoscope, but far outlasted that technology with its low cost and populist appeal.

The growing popularity of movies led projectors to move from vaudeville halls to dedicated theaters around 1905, when the first nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Technological innovation allowed for ever longer films with more complex plots to be projected more clearly and to larger audiences. As the motion picture became a leading form of mass communication, the industry grew rapidly, leading to patent disputes between Edison and his rivals, but also the spread of the cinema across the nation. To pull ahead of the competition, film companies looked to improve the experience of the movies by adding color and sound to their shows. The French-American inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste worked to convert sound waves to light to create an optical soundtrack on film, a technology that led directly to the sound system used today. Film pioneers like Charles Urban and August Plahn worked to perfect a natural and vibrant color for projected film, and the Technicolor Corporation was founded in 1915 to market color technology to American filmmakers.

A separate search in the PHC for the following will be necessary, as they are not included in this scope note: Pre-Cinema Motion Pictures (Zoetropes, Phenakistocopes, Kinoras, Praxinioscopes, flip books, and other optical toys), Magic Lanterns (apparatus and slides for still projection), Motion Capture and High-Speed Photography (work of Muybridge, Marey, Jenkins, and Edgerton to study motion and action through photography), television, and amateur & educational Motion Pictures (home cameras and projectors, educational films and projectors).

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: Date range: 1885-1930
• date made: 1885-1930
• Object Name: Early Cinema Collection
• Subject: Motion Pictures
• Subject: Entertainment, Film
• ID Number: COLL.PHOTOS.000018
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.