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In the 1900s

Dateline: 1/2/1900

Here it is the second day of the 1900s, less than a year away from the last century of the second millennium, and we've already seen the "greatest invention of the age" - moving pictures! The story actually began before 1890.

British photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope projector in the 1880s. He took careful photos of people and animals in motion, and arranged the drawings in a circle on a glass plate that could be rotated in his projector. Building on Muybridge's invention, in 1889, Thomas Edison's crew invented the Kinetoscope movie viewer, and the Kinetograph movie camera was patented in 1893. People watching the Kinetoscope could see moving images of up to one minute in length.

In 1893, the world's first film studio was built at Edison's West Orange, NJ laboratory. Edison made his first motion picture -- a recreation of a sneeze --1893, and a film called The Kiss in 1894. In 1898, the Edison Kinetoscope showed up in an amusement arcade in New York City, and was greeted with great enthusiasm.

At the same time, in France, Louis and August Lumiere created a combination movie camera and movie projector called the Cinematographe, which they demonstrated to the public in 1895. It allowed more than one person to watch films, and the term was cinema arose to describe the theaters and the process. On December 28, 1895, in Paris, the Lumiere Brothers first projected a motion picture in the Salon Indien and charged money for it. They offered twenty showings a day of ten short films, lasting about 20 minutes in total, including the first comedy. Not to be outdone, W.K.L. Dickson of the Edison Company came up with projector called the Vitascope and demonstrated it the following year in New York. After parting ways with Edison, Dickson founded the American Mutoscope Company in 1896, and reinvented the Vitascope, calling it the Mutograph.

The first dedicated cinema building was built in Paris in 1897. There are rumors that we'll see something similar in Los Angeles within two years, courtesy of Thomas L. Talley.

Obviously the best is yet to come. We hear there is a much longer motion picture being planned that will involve an exciting train robbery. We can't wait!

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