Thomas Edison daydreamed at school. Though his teachers were unimpressed, the American inventor later imagined numerous innovative devices and processes. He improved the telegraph system and created the first commercially practical light bulb, as well as the phonograph sound recorder. After seeing Eadweard Muybridge’s and Étienne-Jules Marey’s photography, Edison charged Scottish inventor William Dickson with developing the Kinetoscope, a large cabinet housing 50-foot loops of film that showed short movies on everything from dancing women to boxing cats. One film was Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894), which, like many of the films, Dickson produced with another Edison invention, the Kinetograph, the first motion-picture camera. These inventions contributed to filmmaking as we know it – and prove it pays to daydream.
Watching cat videos isn't a modern phenomenon inspired by the internet. Some of Edison's first films were of boxing cats, like this one preserved by the Library of Congress.
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Collection
In ACMI's collection
On display until
16 February 2031
ACMI: Gallery 1
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
P180318
Curatorial section
The Story of the Moving Image → Moving Pictures → MI-04. Materiality → MI-04-C01
Object Types
2D Object
Exhibition Prop
Photographic print/Pictorial
Materials
graphic