Movie Camera Research Paper

The Early History of the Movie Camera Although there is an ongoing debate over the true inventor of the first movie camera, Thomas Edison is the ingenious figure that receives most of the credit. Edison gained inspiration from previous inventions, as well as depended on other innovative thinkers to help him along the way. His assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, specifically aided Edison by creating a visual version of the phonograph in 1889 (“Motion Pictures,” n.d.). From there, other vital building blocks of the movie camera were made, thus resulting in a machine that could capture repeated pictures at high speed (Charles Edison Fund, n.d.). From the late 19th to early 20th century, others also created their own version of the motion picture camera by utilizing the founding

More specifically, Edison analyzed the 1877 work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who created “a sequence of 24 images of a running horse, taken by 24 cameras” (“Motion Pictures,” n.d.). In 1882, Edison also became captivated by Etienne Jules Marey’s invention, which was a single camera that could take bursts of consecutive photographs. The combination of these creations motivated Edison to make the visual equivalent of the phonograph, a system that reproduced sound (“Motion Pictures,” n.d.). In the year 1888, Edison officially announced to the public that he was working on “an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” (Corliss, 2010, p. 50). The inventor was quite confident that he could create a camera that would take repeated pictures in a rapid speed and record said pictures onto a new celluloid film created by George Eastman, even though this film was originally intended for still photography (Charles Edison Fund, n.d.). With the help of other brilliant minds, Edison eventually achieved this