GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.