Hello, and welcome back to This Week in History! Writing this column always feels like an adventure, especially after returning from nearly a two-month break. I never know just what history will pop up on any given day or week, and now that this column has covered most major events at least once, the more obvious and popular history is crossed off the list. So, this week, we’ll be looking at one of the most exciting periods of innovation in all of history. We’re going to explore a location that quite literally set the stage for a century of filmmaking: the “Black Maria.”
Whenever you watch a kids’ show — or perhaps a comedy with some top-tier editing — whenever a character has a bright idea, they literally light up with a light bulb turning on above their head. Well, in history, that light bulb was the invention of a man who understood just how temporal the limits of humanity’s technology are.
Thomas Edison always had a beaming light bulb over his head, especially in the 1890s when his ideas became so profitable that his name was plastered on countless enterprises in new technology industries. Edison’s influence and ability to endure countless non-profitable ideas pulled geniuses from all over the world to his ranks and enabled him to pioneer technologies with minimal risk to his overall finances.
Understanding the scale of Edison’s foresight and creative genius can be difficult if you’re not in a museum, but his designs extend far beyond the light bulb. From an early age, Edison worked as a telegraph operator, although not through education as one might think.
While working on a railroad track, Edison saved a three-year-old from a rolling boxcar. The boy’s father taught him telegraphy as a reward for his daring act, which soon led Edison to create a remarkable piece of technology: the phonograph.
While only in its initial stages in 1877 — and using easily damaged tinfoil disks to play sound — the phonograph would become an essential component in humanity’s ability to hear itself. Not only did Edison enable humanity to illuminate the world around them; he also enabled someone to preserve their voice and music for others to hear. This invention, in my estimation, was just as significant as the light bulb.
In 1887, Edison and his namesake company started a concrete location from which to experiment and design inventions in West Orange, New Jersey. This lab would provide Edison and his assistants with the ability to quickly devise an invention and provide it to factories for production. Although Edison had several labs he tinkered with, the West Orange lab is exceptionally significant this week in history.
Edison pursued motion pictures with audio playback as his next goal, combining the audio-recording technology of the phonograph with another major innovation from Edison and his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson: the Kinetoscope.
The Kinetoscope was not a typical media-viewing device as we may now think, and the concept and technology for modern video playback were far from developed. However, the Kinetoscope still allowed one viewer at a time to view a high-shutter film playback that appeared as motion capture.
All of this technology blossomed with the newfound infrastructure of the Edison lab in West Orange. By around Feb. 1, 1893, the lab completed the construction of the world’s first motion picture studio. The studio was built on a turntable so that the building could angle itself towards peak sunlight, while its retractable roof could allow as much sunlight into the space as possible.
This sun-centric focus was derived from the limitation of early films, since they required bright environments to effectively capture an image. Edison and Dickson created the space by assembling the light framing of the structure on the turntable, and then layering a dark outer tarpaper on the outside to keep light in. That tarpaper gave the studio its name, as the dark outer layer looked like the police cars that brought prisoners to jails known as “Black Marias.”
The studio was cramped and hot, yet it remained an influential stage for performers of all kinds to congregate, perform and get their movements recorded in what was for a time, the only recording studio in the world.
Hundreds of films were recorded here, and many can be viewed through archives or public videos, like dancer Annabelle Whitford’s “Serpentine Dance.”
Once again blending technologies, Dickson used the “Black Maria,” the Kinetophone and the phonograph in 1894 to record “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film.” Dickson plays a violin into a phonograph, now using wax instead of tinfoil (which solved many issues with the initial design) and enabling two dancers to not only dance to the music, but to be seen dancing to it by those living over a hundred years later.
One final dancer runs across behind the phonograph horn towards the end of the 17-second film, and his brief appearance is worth remembering; it’s like he’s in the film just to be in it. And that’s not an insult to the man’s acting, after all. Who wouldn’t want to be able to see themselves recorded? In a way, it would be like a modern human jumping into a time machine that was only able to jump about five minutes ahead. Though perhaps only a novelty, such a technology would elevate the human experience in a profound way.
The “Black Maria” is just as profound. It has given us a time machine through which to view the past, and it is thanks to the ingenuity and collaborative creativity that poured out of Edison and his labs that we can view those who lived a century before us.
Today, the National Parks Service began reconstruction of the studio (which was torn down by Edison in 1903 after a new studio in New York City was constructed) only a few years ago, which is also home to the Thomas Edison Film Festival.
That’s all for This Week in History. May the spirit of unbridled creativity continue this year. I’ll catch you on the next historical adventure!