By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – It's quiz time. What do Louis Lumiere, William Lincoln, and W.K.L. Dixon have in common? It's a multi-billion dollar industry we primarily use on weekends. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
No, it's not the lawnmower, blue jeans or our bed. All three men are considered by somebody to be "the inventor of the cinema." It was on this date in 1867 that William Lincoln patented his "zoopraxiscope." One would sit in front of the machine and watch moving drawings or photographs through a slit. This might be a stretch by some standards; by others, this was the beginning.
Ah, but About.com notes that it is Frenchman Louis Lumiere, who generally gets the credit for inventing the first motion picture camera. Not only was this camera portable, but it processed the film as well as projected the moving film on screen. And in a true capitalistic spirit, Louis and brother Auguste presented the first real cinema show to a paying audience at the Grand Caf? in Paris, on the 28th of December 1895.
But aha, a year earlier in 1894, the Edison Company introduced the Kinetoscope, a device for individually looking at film through a viewer. This was the first equipment to use 35mm film and the inventor was W.K.L. Dixon. Over the next three years, almost a thousand Kinetoscopes were manufactured. So what did they watch? Edison also produced some 250 films for their viewing enjoyment. Author Ray Phillips notes, "A million people worldwide first saw motion pictures through these devices."
Today, well over 70% of the U.S. population rents or goes to movies regularly. Just in America, that accounts for over 1.5 billion movie attendances each year. And I doubt if Dixon, or Lumiere, or Lincoln, could have ever imagined that revenues from one single film might well exceed the billion-dollar mark. That's "Titanic," of course. Popcorn, anyone?! For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m. To contact Maxine Shapiro, please send emails to mshapiro@kera.org.