The Kinetoscope Parlor - Text 2
The patent application filed on 24 August 1891 (U.S.P. no. 403,536, “Apparatus for Exhibiting Phonographs of Moving Objects”) described a combination of the Kinetograph with the phonograph. In the end it was only in 1894 that Edison manufactured and marketed[5] a device equipped with a phonograph and renamed the Kinetoscope. The phonograph housed inside the Kinetophone was connected by leather pulleys to the electric motor which drove the mechanism pulling the 35 mm film continuously through the device. Edison marketed cylinders with musical accompaniment[6] for each film, thereby creating one of the very first devices which Erkki Huhtamo situates in the “peep media” series.[7] The Kinetoscope did indeed show moving images through an aperture, and play music through ear pieces. This new entertainment, part private and part public, was described as a “Kinetoscope and Phonograph combined”. The term synchronism is not used in either the patent application or the press.
