History Of The Kinetograph, Kinetoscope And Kinetophonograph

by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, Antonia Dickson, W.E Woodbury (Editor)

Cinema buffs will treasure this one-of-a-kind facsimile edition of the first published history of film, reproduced from W.K.L. Dickson's own annotated copy of his groundbreaking 1895 volume. Dickson, co-author with his sister Antonia of this book and of The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison (1894), headed the team at Edison's New Jersey laboratory that was attempting to build "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." The results of their efforts were the kinetograph (the camera used for photographing motion pictures) and the kinetoscope (the means for viewing them). Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1940, Dickson's book is a unique document that allows the reader to experience the wonder and promise of the cinema in its infancy.

55 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1895

About the author

William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson (3 August 1860 – 28 September 1935) was a Scottish inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison (post-dating the work of Louis Le Prince).

William Kennedy Dickson was born on 3 August 1860 in Le Minihic-sur-Rance, Brittany, France. His mother was Elizabeth Kennedy-Laurie (1823?–1879) who may have been born in Virginia. His father was James Waite Dickson, a Scottish artist, astronomer and linguist. James claimed direct lineage from the painter William Hogarth, and from Judge John Waite, the man who sentenced King Charles I to death.

Reviews

[Henrique Quadros]

It's less a history book and more a piece of advertising/catalogue on the kinetograph. Dickson describes how certain features of the invention came to be but mostly he's just describing the different things that they recorded or wanted to record with it. Still, it's an interesting look at what the americans who created the moving image apparatus envisioned as possible uses and effects of the invention.