e one second is equal to 24/500 frames. That means that only 5% of the film is actually being presented. And the human eye compensates, and the spectator thinks he is seeing motion and about 95% percent more than he or she actually is. An average length for a movie these days is roughly one and one half-hours long. In reality you are seeing only 41/2 minutes of pure film. The brain makes up the rest.Knowing this, Edison set out to make a motion picture machine. Edison saw no commercial value in it, which is somewhat ironic, but still decided to make it anyway. In an interview in 1887 he said, “It is possible to devise an instrument, which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” Edison assigned the aforementioned, William Kennedy Dickson to pursue the research and development of his idea. Dickson discovered is that they machine must use light. That may seem very obvious but light was fairly new and somebody had to come up with the idea it must be incorporated in Edison’s idea. For film, Dickson used a 1 and inch wide strip of celluloid. Celluloid was brittle and broke easily but it continued to be used. George Eastman discovered a better substance for film. It was called Eastman film. Eastman had developed the film for Edison’s already invented kinetograph. So using that name, Dickson developed a machine he called the kinetoscope. Thomas Edison first saw the kinetoscope in 1889. The patent rights were granted in 1893, two years after Edison had applied for what he called “an apparatus for exhibiting photographs of moving objects.”Even though, at the time he was working on the kinetoscope, Dickson had effected the projection of a motion picture onto a screen, Edison had refused to put projection machines on the market. When Norman Raff, the company who manufactured the kinetoscope, proposed that they do so, Edison was reported to have replied that the company was...
