Did this film titled “Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats,” spawn today’s crazy cats gone bad videos? If so, did Thomas Edison post the first cats gone bad video?
What’s the big deal? Any toddler worth their salt can make a movie these days. Back in 1894 when this film was shot at Thomas Edison’s New Jersey-based Black Maria, considered by many to be America’s first movie studio, it was a very big deal.
Although Edison has been credited with countless inventions, including light bulbs, the motion picture camera and the phonograph, some people believe that his main talent was as CEO and entrepreneur, rather than inventor.
A master at manipulating patent law, he held 1,093 patents in the United States alone. Many of these were for advancements on work that had preceded his own or that of his team.
Known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park” Edison developed a laboratory where he applied principals of teamwork and mass production to his various products/inventions. He hired many of the great minds of the day (including Tesla at one point) to develop the various projects and expand on other people’s inventions.
Among the many items credited to the Wizard of Menlo Park are his motion picture camera, or “kinetograph” seen above, which utilized the previous work of Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer in the photographic studies of motion.
The Library of Congress page on Thomas Edison offers excellent information on the history of film as well as dozens of downloadable short films.
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