Video Timeline

By: Karlee Post

1882

• Étienne-Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun in 1882, which was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, recording all the frames on the same picture. He used the chronophotographic gun for studying animals and human locomotion.

1889• On June 21, 1889, William Friese-Greene was issued patet no.

10131 for his 'chronophotographic' camera. It was apparently capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film. A report on the camera was published in the British Photographic News on February 28, 1890. On 18 March, Friese-Greene sent a clipping of the story to Thomas Edison, whose laboratory had been developing a motion picture system known as the Kinetoscope.

• William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, commissioned by Thomas Alva Edison, builds the first motion-picture camera and names it the Kinetograph.

1891

• William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, commissioned by Thomas Alva Edison, builds the first motion-picture camera and names it the Kinetograph.

1894

• The Edison Corporation establishes the first motion-picture studio, a Kinetograph production center nicknamed the Black Maria (slang for a police van) 1894 Edison unveils Kinetoscope, a device that allows one person at a time to view motion pictures. The first Kinetoscope parlor opens at 1155 Broadway in New York City. Spectators can watch films for 25 cents.

1895

• In France, Auguste and Louis Lumière hold the first private screening. The brothers invent the Cinématograph, a combination camera and projector. The image of an oncoming train is said to have caused a stampede.

1897

• In 1897, Robert W. Paul had the first real rotating camera head made to put on a tripod, so that he could follow the passing processions of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot. This device had the camera mounted on a vertical axis that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank handle, and Paul put it on general sale the next year. Shots taken using such a "panning" head were also referred to as "panoramas" in the film catalogues of the first decade of the cinema.

1903

• Edison Corporation mechanic Edwin S. Porter turns cameraman, director and producer to make The Great Train Robbery. With 14 shots cutting between simultaneous events, this 12-minute short establishes the shot as film's basic element and editing as a central narrative device. It is also the first Western.

1905

• The first movie theater opens in Pittsburgh.

1909

• The New York Times publishes the first movie review, a report on D. W. Griffith's Pippa Passes.

1910

• Thomas Edison introduces his kinetophone, which makes talkies a reality.

1911

• The first feature film is released when the two reels of D. W. Griffith's Enoch Arden are screened together.

1912

• Photoplay debuts as the first magazine for movie fans

1914

• In his second big-screen appearance, Charlie Chaplin plays the Little Tramp, his most famous character. Winsor McCay unleashes Gertie the Dinosaur, the first animated cartoon.

1915

• D. W. Griffith's technically brilliant Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, introduces the narrative close-up, the flashback and other elements that endure today as the structural principles of narrative filmmaking.

1920s

• The first television camera by Philo Taylor Fansworth, which converted the image captured into an electrical signal. Back then films were used to record images.

1941

• In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles subordinates all previous technological and cinematic accomplishments to his own essentially cinematic vision. Using newly developed film stocks and a wider, faster lens, Welles pushes the boundaries of montage and mise-en-scène, as well as sound, redefining the medium.

1950s

• Some companies started looking into using a form of magnetic tape to record live images from television. Charles Ginsburg led a team of researchers at Ampex Corporation in developing a video recorder, which led to the invention of the first VTR (video tape recorder).

1951

• The VTR started the recording of live images from television cameras, which converted these images into electrical impulses saved onto magnetic tapes

1968 & 1990

• 1968-The motion picture rating system debuts with G, PG, R and X

• 1990-The X rating is replaced by NC-17 (no children under 17).

1971

• Sony sold their first VCR (video cassette recorder).

1981

• Sony unveiled the first digital camera--the Sony Mavica (magnetic video camera). It made use of a fast-rotating magnetic disc approximately 2 inches in diameter.