History of Moviemaking

When it comes to the history of moviemaking, people tend to assume that it all started with Hollywood in Los Angeles, California – with the place itself being synonymous with the moviemaking industry. But the truth is motion pictures themselves were already made as early as the 1890s, when Hollywood was nothing more than a little farm town a short distance away from Los Angeles, which itself is still in its infancy, with California only joining the union in 1850.

Motion pictures themselves were first made by employees of Thomas Edison’s laboratories in New Jersey, which led to the area dominating the movie industry during the first 15 years of its inception. Hollywood wasn’t a major player in the industry until 1918 when the place became home to as many as 20 different movie studios such as Columbia, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, MGM and its contemporaries.

As for the first movie itself, the first motion picture is a celluloid recording of a sneeze. It was recorded using a new camera called the Kinetograph in 1893, which was invented by an assistant for Edison’s laboratories named William Kennedy Laurie Dickinson. The Kinetograph was then attached to a device called a Kinetoscope, which allows a single viewer to watch the film loop using a peephole. This was a very crude means of watching movies, and it wasn’t until April 1894, when the first Kinetoscope parlor was opened in New York, that movies became commercially viable. It took 10 more years before new technology allowed movies to be projected onto screens that can be viewed by multiple people, and thus, the moviemaking industry is up and running.