An interesting video on war films made during the Spanish-American War. We sometimes forget just how rapid technological change was in the 19th century. A young man who fought in the Mexican War, one of the first wars with widespread use of photography, could have still been alive as an old man watching the war films of the Spanish-American War.
One of the major beneficiaries of the cutting edge technology of motion pictures was Theodore Roosevelt. He had received massive newspaper publicity when he formed the Rough Riders and movie goers were hungry to see his exploits. Here is a Thomas Edison film showing the Rough Riders in action at the battle of El Caney, or so the movie goers thought. The movie was actually filmed in New Jersey by the Wizard of Melo Park’s film company!
“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
Thomas Edison, 1879
Ah, Thomas Edison, that paragon of hard work and genius. Electric lights had been experimented with since 1802. Making a commercially viable light bulb however, eluded the numerous scientists working on the problem until Edison succeeded. This was the type of problem that Edison excelled at: one that required a bit of inspiration and a large amount of perspiration.
Beginning in 1878 Edison began work on a commercially viable incandescent electric lamp. He decided that for indoor home use the light source had to operate on low voltage. The idea of running current through a vacuum tube to produce light had been around for decades. With improved pumping equipment Edison was able to make a better vacuum tube, and then his research centered on a long lasting filament. Edison spoke about the process in 1890:
I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.
Carbonized bamboo filaments would burn for 1200 hours. A new age of light commenced.
Patent battles were inevitable with so many other inventors working on the light bulb. Edison, ever the shrewd businessman, prevailed with a mixture of legal fights, purchasing patents, going into joint ventures with competitors, and buying other competitors out. Edison’s business skills were as brilliant as his light bulb.
How rare it is in history for a scientific genius to also possess considerable business acumen and the ability to direct a large body of men working under him. Thomas Edison possessed all of those gifts. With one of the sharper minds granted to a man, he had the inspiration to invent hundreds of devices. He directed eventually a large work force of employees, some of whom had intellects almost as sharp as his. Finally he could take his inventions and develop markets for them.
Edison thought of “moving pictures” as doing for the eye what his phonograph did for the ear. In February of 1888 Edison met with chrono-photographer Eadweard Muybridge who used what he called a zoopraxiscope to rapidly project painted images on a screen to give the illusion of music. They announced they would combine this technology with Edison’s phonograph. From the outset Edison envisioned “talkies”. Most of the actual work in producing the first movies was done by Edison’s employee W. K. L. Dickson, who had served as Edison’s official photographer.
Edison devised the idea of a kinetoscope, but it was Dickson who brought it to reality, producing “moving” images by running strips of film across a light source. Dickson invented the first practical celluloid film to serve as the medium upon which the photographs would be placed. The first films were displayed as “peep shows” in penny arcades, the movies often focusing on boxing matches and other athletic contests.
Dickson went on to produce the first film for a pope, and had his camera blessed by Leo XIII. (more…)
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 