The Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope in my opinion was one of the most vital and key animation devices created to date and is easily responsible for modern day cinema. The kinetoscope was invented by Thomas Edison the world famous inventor.

The Kinetoscope was a very early form of motion picture, as such cinema. The design of this animation device was like no other to date, it was far more advanced than that of the Zoetrope or Phenakistoscope, even though it was near 50 years after these its design was still far more advanced and within a very sort period of time evolved into an early stage of what we call cinema. The Kinetoscope worked in the same way as other animation devices, using stop motion it had a large number of frames (still images) which would be viewed in a window. So far this is very similar to the other devices however the rest is very unique. Rather than using a drum that rotates to display a limited number of images, the drums were used as a way of feeding a strip of images (stills) to the window which had a remote closing shutter this shutter would open and close at extremely fast speeds so the changing of an image was not saw, as such when the machine was on it would give the illusion of movement like the others.

The benefit of using this system was that the amount of frames that could be used and so the length of the animation was massive. These could still be looped like other methods however animations now could get more complex and incoperate so much more than the simplistic designs to this point. This was a revolutionary device as it now allowed feature length animations to be made and in 1984 the first ever motion picture was created using 10 Kinetoscope.

The success of this device was massive, this rapidly became the most talked about thing in many states in america and Edison realising the importance of such a device did not seek patents for it in europe allowing many copies of this device to be produced, this was a very important step for the evolution of cinema as it allowed many other inventors to understand the device, reproduce it and expand upon it. within only afew years the Kinetoscope had grown so large it was beginning to be installed into venuses as an entertainment form and many businessed began to produce images for use within these (later to be known as animations and then cartoons). This grew further in the early 1900's and ended up with the later upgrade on the Kinetoscope being produced which was in effect cinema we have know al be it without sound.

The main flaw to this device unlike others was the fact only one person could use the device at a time. Though this was not a dramatic flaw, it could be argued this infact helped speed up the development of this into a motion picture projector as the demand was so great. Another disadvantage was the sheer size of this device made it both expensive and unrealistic as a home use device, again however this is arguable as it could be seen to be a good thing as it was the spark to making media a more puplic event. Unlike other devices the advantages were vast, animations could be much longer, viewing could be more easily monitored in public and film could be used in these (a reletively new invention coming from cameras, this meant not only cartoons and drawings could be made but realistic movies).

Below is the first ever motion picture to be shown on the kinetoscope, and the first ever copyrighted film ever made.