Which was the first film displayed to the public?
The first PUBLIC DISPLAY OF FILMS took place at the Edison Laboratories in West Orange on 22 May 1891, when 147 representatives of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, having lunched with Mrs. Edison at Glenmont, were taken over her husband’s workshops and allowed to view the new Kinetoscope. The Sun newspaper reported. The surprised and pleased club women saw a small pine box standing on the floor. There were some wheels and belts near the box, and a workman who had them in charge. In the top of the box was a hole perhaps an inch in diameter. As they looked through the hole they saw the picture of a man. It was a most marvelous picture. It bowed and smiled and waved its hands and took off its hat with the most perfect naturalness and grace. Every motion was perfect … The film used for this demonstration appears to have been taken with a horizontal-feed camera without sprockets. This would have been an imperfect apparatus at best, and it is not until October 1892 that there is evidence that Dickson had built an effective vertical-feed camera using perforated film. In that month the Phonogram published an illustration showing sequences from four films evidently taken with such a device. These included pictures of Dickson himself, together with his helper, William Heise, and also shots of fencers engaged in swordplay, and wrestlers. By this date, then, it can be positively asserted that Dickson had overcome all the obstacles that had stood in the way of making films suitable for commercial exhibition. He was to receive little thanks for his work. After Dickson had left West Orange in 1895, following a dispute with his employer, Edison steadfastly refused to concede that anyone but himself was responsible for bringing the invention to fruition: Most writers were content to accept Edison’s own version of events until the appearance in 1961 of a painstaking work of scholarship titled The Edison Motion Picture Myth. The author, Gordon Hendricks, demonstrates by reference to the hitherto unpublished papers in the Edison archives that all the experimental work on the Kinetoscope was conducted by Dickson, or under his direction, and that Edison himself can be credited with little more than instigating the research programme and providing facilities for carrying it out.
