--- title: Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer | TIME description: With films of Annie Oakley shooting, boxing cats and Frankenstein, Thomas Edison and his team were pioneers in early motion pictures canonical: https://time.com/video/NgmTtjP2/ og:title: Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer og:description: With films of Annie Oakley shooting, boxing cats and Frankenstein, Thomas Edison and his team were pioneers in early motion pictures og:url: https://time.com/video/NgmTtjP2/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/NgmTtjP2/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer twitter:description: With films of Annie Oakley shooting, boxing cats and Frankenstein, Thomas Edison and his team were pioneers in early motion pictures twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/NgmTtjP2/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer [Watch (HLS stream): Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/NgmTtjP2.m3u8) (4:29)  _Published 2010-07-08. With films of Annie Oakley shooting, boxing cats and Frankenstein, Thomas Edison and his team were pioneers in early motion pictures_ --- Jul 27, 2023 2:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Exclusive Clip: Edison'](/video/aZxLMFko/) ### Exclusive Clip: Edison' [Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine](/video/e3W59g0F/) ### Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine [Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle](/video/sAl3scYg/) ### Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle --- ## Transcript >> Edison came to movie making in part because Eadweard Muybridge who was famous for his series of rapidly taken series of photographs, motion, both of animals and humans, inspired a lot of people to think about motion pictures. Muybridge came to West Orange to give a lecture in October 1888, and he and Edison got together afterwards, and Edison and Muybridge were talking initially about Edison taking his photograph and figuring out how to bring it up to Muybridge's device for displaying these motion pictures. And then as Edison thought about it a little bit more, within a few days, he had decided, you know what, I am going to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. He designed a cylinder that would have microphotographs on it. And as the cylinder turned, he would look at it through a microscope- like eyepiece and you would see motion pictures because the whole basis of motion pictures is persistence of vision. There was a scientist named Marey who has developed a roll of film camera used with a rifle so he could take rapid shots of birds in flight to study them. So, this idea of roll film comes to Edison. He actually develops the idea of [ unk ] 35 mm and quickly begin to develop the motion picture camera. >> One of the early films that we had here were done what we called The Black Moriah. It's the first building built for the recording of motion picture. Very awkward. It had a roof that would open up so that the sun would shine down on the building. >> It was on tracks so that it could follow the sun. >> And every 20 minutes or so, you had to get out and push it around. So, you always had light on the stage. The first films were simple. It was something that everybody would recognized. Maybe it was somebody feeding chickens. It might be a famous person like Sandow: The Strong Man. One of my favorite stories is of Annie Oakley and she is in the Wild West Show, but she wants to be preserved and she comes and shoots-- shows her shooting expertise here in The Black Moriah. >> The Edison Motion Picture company was very successful for a number of years. There was a particularly innovative director called Edwin Porter who made many of the early important pictures, did a wonderful Jack and the Beanstalk with all sorts of special effects. He had his famous film of The Great Train Robbery, the first western. And then Porter left and over time the company just never really became as innovative in filmmaking. I don't think Edison really had a good idea of what the commercial value of motion pictures was. He only saw it sort of as a sentimental thing and potentially an educational thing, but didn't really, I think, imagine the art form that it became. In contrast, you have these key artists like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, the great director, form United Artists. And I think that represents the difference between the Edison approach, which was always about the technology, and the United Artists, which was about the art form. After World War I, Edison sells off his motion picture business. 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