The Kinetoscope Parlor - Text 1
Initially, in the first patent caveat of 8 October 1888, Edison imagined a kind of optical phonograph in which the phonograph’s usual cylinder, now covered with a light-sensitive coating, would make it possible to obtain microscopic photographs to be enlarged when viewed, with the sound recorded on a second cylinder.[1] Following numerous tests, Edison concluded that he “had to look elsewhere”[2] and definitively abandoned the optical phonograph project. That same year, on 2 November, he filed a patent caveat describing the film:
a sensitive material [pellicule] in the form of a long strip which unspools from one reel to another while passing in front of a square opening. The strip has a series of holes on each side, located exactly opposite each other.[3]
It was because of his knowledge of telegraphy that Edison had the idea of perforations. In fact he was directly inspired by the automatic telegraph invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1859[4] and undertook new experiments, this time with a strip of perforated celluloid. Like Étienne-Jules Marey with his moving strip camera (1888), he pictured a device with a sensitive celluloid strip, but with the fundamental difference that his support was perforated on each side and pulled forward by a cogwheel. He gave this device the name Kinetograph, for the camera, and Kinetoscope for the viewer.
