The Cinema: past, present & future....

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History of Edison Motion Pictures:
Early Edison Motion Picture Production (1892-1895)



The Black Maria, Edison's first motion picture studio.


A constant flow of new film subjects was needed to keep the new invention popular, so a motion picture production studio was built at West Orange in December 1892. It was dubbed the Black Maria on account of its resemblance to a police patrol wagon. The studio had a roof that could be opened to admit sunlight for illumination, and the building itself was mounted on a revolving pivot so that the structure could be constantly repositioned to keep it aligned with the sun.

(The Black Maria's era came to an end in January 1901 when Edison inaugurated a new glass-enclosed studio on a rooftop in New York.)

The first motion pictures made in the Black Maria were deposited for copyright by W. K. L. Dickson at the Library of Congress in August 1893. The earliest copyrighted film that still survives is Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894, also known as Fred Ott's Sneeze, which records Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing comically for the camera. This motion picture was not submitted to the Copyright Office on celluloid film, but rather as a series of positive photographic prints.

For rest of article go here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist1.html