The Wizard of Menlo Park (27 page)

No fight could be presented in full using twenty-second reels, however. Rector, who had a background in engineering, worked with the personnel at the Edison laboratory to adapt both the camera and the display box to accommodate a reel that was three times as long, with three times the playing time. With a capacity of sixty seconds, an entire, albeit shortened, round (the standard round was three minutes) could be captured, with a beginning and an end.

The new equipment was put to work in the Black Maria almost immediately. On 15 June 1894, Michael Leonard, an established fighter, met the lesser-known Jack Cushing for a six-round bout that was filmed by Dickson and his assistant, William Heise. In order to fit the cameras into the small space, the ring was only twelve feet square. In between each one-minute round, the fighters enjoyed seven minutes of rest, while the camera operators changed the film. This was pronounced a “great and glorious idea” by one sportswriter, who observed that the long interval between rounds enabled the fighters to recover their breath and “start to work each time fresh and nimble as though nothing had happened.”

A prizefight did not help to advance high culture, but Edison took great personal interest in the event nonetheless. He was the official master of ceremonies (even though boxing was illegal in New Jersey), and an enthusiastic spectator, feinting and “punching” along with the others who were on hand, fighting a “battle in pantomime, after the fashion of all novices,” said one account. The
New York World
did its part to pique the curiosity of prospective kinetoscope customers by reporting that in the excitement there was confusion about the outcome of the fight. Afterward, Leonard landed a good verbal punch, saying he would have hit Cushing more but “Mr. Edison treated me right, and I didn’t want to be too quick for his machine.” Cushing claimed that he was too busy looking at the camera, trying to keep a pleasant expression on, to pay attention to what Leonard was doing. It didn’t matter, he said, because Leonard was not “muscular enough to fold towels in a Turkish bath.”

Each of the six rounds of the fight was placed in a separate kinetoscope, which had been enlarged to accommodate the 150 feet of film that rested in vertical coils. Patrons were charged ten cents for the privilege of seeing one round, and if all went well, true fight fans would pay to see all six. The plan went well indeed. When the Kinetoscope Exhibiting Company opened for business on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan in August 1896, the storefront was packed with eager throngs on the first day. On the second, lines formed into the street, prompting a call to the police for help in crowd control.

The success proved the drawing power of boxing for the new medium, and the Latham brothers moved quickly to arrange for another match, with a bigger name. They approached James Corbett, the reigning heavyweight champion, and offered him the opportunity to earn a sizable prize against a local patsy, Peter Courtney. It would be a “finish fight,” going however many rounds were needed before one of the combatants was knocked out or unable to rise from his stool. Both the sponsors and Corbett showed considerable sophistication in working out the details of the arrangement. The Lathams insisted that Corbett grant to their company exclusive film rights; Corbett, on his part, demanded, and received, a clause specifying royalty payments for every set of film prints that would be put on exhibition; this proved a brilliant stroke on his part.

Like a modern-day fight promoter preparing a pay-per-view event, the Lathams worried about the possibility of a quick knockout—this would keep only a single kinetoscope busy instead of a line of machines for each round. They also did not want a fight that went on too long; a finish that came in the thirtieth round would come well after the pocket money, if not the patience, of the average fight fan would be exhausted. From a strictly commercial perspective, they decided the ideal length would be six rounds. But how could a genuine “finish fight” last a predetermined number of rounds? Simple: The remuneration offered to the dominant fighter was structured to achieve the desired result. The Lathams offered Corbett $4,750 of the $5,000 purse, but in order to collect he had to knock out his opponent in the sixth round—not earlier, not later. “You can bet I’ll do the trick, too,” Corbett predicted prior to the event, “for it’s too much money to let slip out of one’s grasp.”

Corbett was a good choice to serve as the leading man in this drama. He was a professional actor as well as fighter, performing on Broadway at the time in
Gentleman Jack.
He had become so accustomed to drawing attention to himself that he had lost the ability to become publicly invisible, which was now a problem. Local police had been angered by the flagrant violation of the state ban on boxing when Edison’s laboratory had hosted the first filmed fight a few months earlier. On the day of Corbett’s fight, 7 September 1894, when he and his large retinue caught the Christopher Street ferry for New Jersey, they were supposed to do their utmost to travel incognito to avoid being arrested. Upon disembarking from the train station, he and his entourage did divide up into two groups to evade detection on the last leg of their journey to the Black Maria. But Corbett could not resist displaying his customary sartorial splendor (natty checked-cloth suit; immaculate white shirt; diamonds nestled upon black tie) and flashing the three jewel-encrusted rings worn on his right pinkie.

As before, the Black Maria had room only for the makeshift ring and a few invited guests. The photographic equipment was much improved: One account said that the rounds lasted ninety seconds, with only a one- to two-minute interval between each. Corbett was careful and made sure that the fight lasted exactly as long as the sponsors had requested. He knocked his opponent down in the third round and could easily have put him away then, but he backed off so that the show could go on. A bit later, Corbett connected with a left to the jaw, then with a right, landing on the same spot, and Courtney went down. He tried to get up, then pitched forward, unconscious. The referee counted off ten seconds and the fight was over. Wonder of wonders, this “finish fight” finished in the sixth round.

Afterward, when a local judge heard about the event, he charged a grand jury to investigate. Edison was summoned to appear, but Mina told the authorities that he was up at Ogdensburg, working at the mine site (the documentary record leaves open the question of where Edison was on the day of the fight itself). The local law-enforcement apparatus soon found other matters of greater interest, and no charges were pressed. But the fact that Edison was indeed spending most of his time at the mine is important because it goes a long way in explaining why he committed the single largest blunder in his career as inventor-cum-businessperson. He failed to see what was needed to fully realize the commercial value of the Corbett-Courtney fight that had just been filmed. It had a professional actor as its star performer; it had drama with a satisfying denouement; it was the right duration to maximize box-office revenue without antagonizing patrons—it had everything but a means of presentation that could handle large numbers of customers simultaneously. For that, the images had to be freed from the confined space of the kinetoscope box. They needed to be projected so that a roomful of people could enjoy them at the same time. Anyone who spent time with the exhibitors would have seen the problem in an instant. Edison, who had seventy-ton rollers on his mind, missed it completely.

The Latham brothers, however, saw immediately the need for a projection system. As pleased as they were by the profits they collected from exhibiting the Corbett-Courtney fight in kinetoscopes, they felt even a greater degree of frustration in the inefficiency of a display that could only serve one patron at a time. The young men invited their father, Woodville Latham, a professor of chemistry at West Virginia University, to visit their Nassau Street parlor and render a scientific opinion: Was there any way they would be able to project the miniature images upon a sheet? Optics was not the elder Latham’s academic field, but he told them that he was certain that any photographed image could be projected on a screen. His interest piqued, he joined them in launching a crash project to develop movie projection. Rather than working with Edison’s laboratory as the Latham brothers had done earlier when they wanted to increase the running time of a kinetoscope reel, this time they set off on their own. A small room, twelve by fifteen feet, was rented to serve as the new lab. Eugene Lauste, an expert mechanic and former employee of Edison’s, was the first person hired. The tiny space became still smaller when Lauste set up his cot and took up residence there.

The Lathams were not the only exhibitors frustrated with Edison’s kinetoscope, and the others urged Edison to introduce a projection machine. Edison was adamant: no. He reasoned that the peephole machines were selling well and at a good profit. The problem with projection was that it would work all too well—if he replaced the inefficient kinetoscope with projection systems that could serve up the show to everyone, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States.” He concluded, “Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

At Edison’s lab in Orange, without his boss’s approval, W. K. L. Dickson carried out research on film projection on his own and shared his findings with a friend who was a keen listener: Otway Latham. And when Dickson accepted an invitation to try a projection experiment in a physics laboratory at Columbia, who should show up but Otway’s father, Professor Latham. The Lathams made an offer to Dickson—come join us and we’ll give you a quarter-share interest in the business—but Dickson was unwilling to make the leap. When Edison got word of his fraternizing with the Lathams, however, and failed to reassure Dickson that he believed Dickson’s dealings had been perfectly honorable, Dickson felt he had no choice but to resign. The exact chronology of what he did and what he knew at various points preceding his resignation would be the subject of much litigation that followed. But regardless of intellectual-property issues, Edison lost the one person on his staff who would have been most valuable to him in developing a projection system.

The Lathams and Dickson had discovered that sending a bright light through a moving strip of film did not project satisfactorily because any given image did not absorb enough light before it sped on. The Lathams came up with a partial solution, which was to make the film wider, providing more area for the light to catch as each image went by. The projected images were about the size of a window and good enough to unveil publicly. Professor Latham gave a demonstration of his newly christened Pantoptikon to reporters in April 1895.

Press accounts were less interested in the pantoptikon than in Edison’s critique of it. Here was an opportunity for Edison to offer a few gracious words to the competition, a modest outfit that only had financial resources to produce the one demonstration unit and not much else. And still Edison could not bring himself to tip his hat. Going solely on what the reporter described to him, Edison claimed that a kinetoscope could do everything that the Latham machine purported to do. Why was everyone making such a fuss about projecting pictures? He’d done that long before, but the pictures had been crude. Wait two or three months, he promised, and “we will have the kinetoscope perfected, and then we will show you screen pictures.” Professor Latham wrote a letter to the editor in response that took Edison’s self-flattering account apart, point by point.

A few weeks later, the Lathams, no longer dependent upon the Black Maria, photographed a boxing match on the roof of Madison Square Garden, and on 20 May 1895, offered the public the first showing of motion pictures on a screen. The Lathams’ projector, now renamed the Eidoloscope, provided a “Life Size” reproduction of the fight, and a broadside printed for the occasion promised, “During the Exhibition the Audience will be Comfortably Seated.” This was not a claim that Edison could ever make for his peephole machines, which required standing, stooping, and squinting. And if this was not galling enough, newspapers around the country seemed to be reveling in Edison’s eclipse by unknown newcomers. “Edison Not in It!” shouted one headline in a Chicago paper, followed by “Kenetoscope [
sic
] Outclassed by Prof. Latham’s Newest.”

By the time the Wizard came down from the mountain and noticed what he had missed, he was too late. Not only in the United States, but also in France, England, and Germany, inventors were attacking the screen-projection problem simultaneously. In the race in the United States, the Lathams appeared to be in the lead. But they failed to understand that the wider film used in their eidoloscope could not draw in enough light to provide an image that was bright and large enough to be of commercial service. The fundamental problem that bedeviled all of the early attempts at projection remained: insufficient light. Two inventors who lived in Washington, D.C., Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, were the first to figure out the solution—the moving images needed to stop momentarily, so that enough light could pass through to produce a clear image, just as when filming, the camera had to stop momentarily to allow the light that came in through the aperture to produce a photochemical reaction and register. Their projector, the Phantascope, moved the film in the only way that could produce bright pictures and smooth-appearing action: by stopping each frame as it passed by the lamp.

Only in folklore does the world beat a path to the inventor of the better mousetrap. In September 1895, the world simply shrugged when Armat and Jenkins publicly unveiled their new machine in a corner of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. A local paper gave it brief mention, but only a few visitors stopped by, and the inventors had nothing to show for their first attempt at marketing. The two soon quarreled over assignment of the patents—given the dismal state of their business, this showed a hardy optimism—and dissolved their partnership.

Edison’s largest kinetoscope distributor, Raff & Gammon, begged Edison in early October to complete the “Screen Machine” that he had promised them. The next day, Edison personally handwrote a letter that showed what was currently most on his mind. It was addressed not to Raff & Gammon, but to the Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company: “Gentlemen, We are using six of your drills at our mine and find them perfectly satisfactory.” One cannot help but admire the obstinate way in which Edison refused to let go of his failing mining project. He jeopardized his own role in the commercialization of fun because he was having a great deal of fun himself, pursuing at his ore mill his own bliss, in his own way. He was happily immersed even though it entailed living for long, lonely stretches up at the mine without Mina. (His letters reveal his loneliness. They also provide a tiny contribution to the history of sex. In one letter, he tells her a joke he had just heard: How can one recognize the modern woman, or so-called Coming Woman? “The answer is ‘Quite easily by their panting or short breaths.’” Concerned that she would not be able to “study out the joke,” he told her not to show it to just anybody “because it is
bad.
”)