Edison Home Kinetoscope(1912–1916)

Sold to the public as a “biograph that a child can handle, and that an ordinary living room can hold”, Edison’s Home Kinetoscope was inspired by the inventor’s desire to promote film’s use in educational settings and in the home (Talking Machine World, 1912b). A patent for what became the Home Kinetoscope was submitted on October 12, 1911, by Adolph Gall of West Orange, New Jersey (curiously, Edison’s name is nowhere to be found on the application). The patent was not granted until November 14, 1916, by which point the projector and its proprietary film were already off the market. Described in the application as “a very simple and efficient form of kinetoscope […] having a plurality of rows of pictures” across the 22mm width of the film it projected, the Home Kinetoscope was designed to “be used successfully by unskilled persons” (US patent 1,204,424).  

Writing in the pages of Educational Screen in 1943, William Jamison credited someone other than Gall with inspiration for the system: Edison employee “Bill” Waddell, who tinkered “with a couple of simple sprockets out of which he hoped to evolve a toy projector for children.” According to Jamison, Edison jettisoned Waddell’s idea of a toy projector in favor of making an easy-to-operate device and a film format to go with it, aimed at home and classroom use. According to Jamison, Edison assigned “Billy Gaul” (surely a nickname and misspelling of Adolph Gall), “the laboratory expert on machine design”, to develop the system (Jamison, 1943: p. 18).

The Home Kinetoscope hit the market in 1912. In their publicity for the new device, Thomas A. Edison, Inc. tried to convince the public that the projector was “safe”, easy to use, well designed, and even comparable in quality to the Edison projectors being used for theatrical exhibition (Edison Company, c. 1912). The safety claim was based primarily on the choice to use cellulose diacetate film stock, which is often referred to simply as “safety” film. Regarding the format’s intended use in the home, in a letter to Thomas Edison, George Eastman wrote that “the furnishing of cellulose nitrate for such a purpose would be wholly indefensible and reprehensible” (quoted in Coe, 1981: p. 164). 

Back catalogue 35mm films made by Edison Co. were reduced and printed onto the system’s unique three-column, 22mm format. Historian Alan Kattelle has described the way that these films were presented to the consumer “on 1-inch wooden cores, in round galvanized steel cans 1½ inches deep and either 2¾ or 3⅜ inches in diameter.” (Kattelle, 2002: p. 124). Each of the wooden spools had a small, attached metal clamp that one end of the film was slid under to prevent it from spinning loosely. Edison even printed the phrase “attach this end to spool this side out” on the ends of the prints to aid the amateur projectionist. 

Edison divided the films for the Home Kinetoscope into classes, ranging from A to H, with purchase prices from US$2 to US$20 based on the film’s “cost of their production”, which was directly proportional to the length of the film (Edison Company, c. 1912).  When an owner tired of a film, they were encouraged to mail it back, along with a small fee, to exchange for another film in the same class. There was a total of 260 films in the company’s 22mm film catalog. In a 2002 issue of The Moving Image, Kattelle and the Association of Moving Image Archivists Small Gauge Working Group published a list of copyright entries and archival locations for Edison Home Kinetoscope 22mm films, noting that “close to 70 percent of the EHK films survive in some form, a much higher percentage than all other silent American films” (Small Gauge Working Group, 2002).  

As innovative as the idea for a Netflix-like mail-in film system was, few users appear to have exchanged films, suggesting an unconvinced and unenthusiastic public. Film historian Ben Singer sums up the fizzling out of the system: “marketing mistakes, technological imperfections, a misperceived cultural environment, economic disincentives, basic inconveniences, and an act of God [a fire at Edison’s New Jersey facilities]” conspired to end the life of the Home Kinetoscope not long after its market debut (Singer, 1988). A fitting summation appears in a November 18, 1916, classified advertisement for an Edison Home Kinetoscope being sold with several film subjects and a book of exchange coupons for US$50 – less than half of what it would have cost when first introduced to the market, but not yet so pitiful a sum as to indicate complete obsolescence (Moving Picture World, 1916: p. 1069). 

Careful examination of the University of Southern California’s 22mm print of The Amateur William Tell reveals some of the problems inherent to the system. The print shows significant printed-in dirt, indicating that quality was not a primary concern at the time it was produced. When the picture is enlarged during projection, the action looks like it is taking place in a light snowstorm, with white specks appearing across the screen. At least in this case, the Home Kinetoscope was enlarging an image from a crudely reduction-printed, approximately 5mm-wide frame, which, of course, can only be blown up so large before it begins to appear very fuzzy. Although the image size was similar in dimension to that of future 8mm film prints, the later technology benefitted greatly from more than two decades’ worth of technical improvements in optical printing techniques.

Projection size and brightness varied based on the different illumination systems and lenses available.  There were three different light sources which included an acetylene burner (similar to the lanterns used by miners) for rural areas not equipped for electricity. The two electrical options included an early incandescent lamp called the Nernst lamp, named after inventor Walther Nernst, and what seems to be the most commonly found one in archives and collections, the Baby Arc lamp, with an accompanying rheostat or transformer to accommodate different types of electrical current. 

Three different lenses were available for the system; these utilized a similar lettering system to the film classes. The model “A” lens was designed for long projection, the “B” for normal, and the “C” for wide angle. Combined with the choice of light source, a model “B” lens with the Nernst lamp was said to provide an adequate picture of roughly 18 in x 24 in (45.72cm x 60.96cm), whereas the Baby Arc lamp used with the model “A” lens was advertised as being capable of throwing an image of 54 in x 72 in (137.2cm x 182.9cm) at 30 ft (9.14m). The downgrade in image quality created by stretching the 5.1mm image up to a 6-ft-wide (1.83m) projection would have been significant. 

Edison Co.’s system was launched the same year as Pathé’s 28mm projector and film, which was also aimed at the home market. The obvious quality differences between the two systems were exaggerated by the poor printing of the EHK films as compared to the almost theatrical quality of many of Pathé’s films, which is not surprising given the significant difference in the size of the image, which was more than four times as large as the EHK image. The perforations used for both 28mm and the EHK are surprisingly similar in size and shape; they are roughly similar in size to, but slightly smaller than, the Bell and Howell perforations. Perhaps ironically, given its conceptual origins, the Home Kinetoscope was, in fact, closer to the quality of a toy projector, while also being considerably more complicated to use.  

According to Kattelle’s research at the Edison Historic Site, a 1915 internal report revealed that only around 500 Home Kinetoscope machines had been sold, out of the 4,686 manufactured. By the end of 1914, Edison Co. had essentially abandoned the system.