Thomas Edison was granted a patent for the Kinetographic Camera
On this day · 31 August 1897
Filed in 1891 but granted six years later, the patent staked Edison's claim to the machine that captured motion onto strips of film.
On 31 August 1897, the U.S. Patent Office granted Thomas A. Edison patent No. 589,168 for the “Kinetographic Camera” — the device better known as the Kinetograph, which photographed a moving scene as a rapid succession of images on a strip of perforated celluloid film.
The paperwork lagged far behind the invention. Edison had filed the application on 24 August 1891, and most of the actual engineering was done by his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson at the West Orange laboratory in New Jersey from around 1889. By 1894 the resulting films were being watched, one viewer at a time, through Edison’s coin-operated Kinetoscope peep-box.
A six-year patent delay for the machine that taught the world to see in motion.
The camera and its viewer helped seed an entire industry, and Edison’s lab — now a National Historical Park — became home to the world’s first motion-picture studio, the tar-papered Black Maria.
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