POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Notes

Used by Mr. Charles Edward Allingham [Australia], c.1930. Mr Allingham purchased the Patersons Pharmacist, 384 Darling St, Balmain, in 1930. His niece believes it was around this time that he purchased the Kinetoscope at auction. After Mr Allingham's death, in late 1995, his sister and niece were charged with disposing of his estate. The steady evolution of professional cinema in the last hundred years, is in part due to the adoption of the internationally recognised 35 mm format in 1909. (Motion Pictures Patents Company). However fierce competition in the home-cinema industry at the beginning of the century, led to a number of competing film sizes and systems. The first attempt at the development and distribution of a mass produced amateur camera/projector system was Robert Paul and Birt Acres' 17.5mm Birtac in 1899. More successful was Heinrich Ernemann, who in 1903 introduced the Kino 1. Aside from French experiments in the early 1900s with both 15mm and 21 mm formats, little further development took place in amateur film until 1912, when first Edison's Home Kinetoscope and later the French company Pathe's 28mm Kok projector, were released. On account of its increased film size and reliability, the Pathe Kok proved to be far more successful and was accepted as the standard for portable film projectors by the US Society of Motion Picture Engineers. Until 1923, when Kodak introduced 16 mm films (accepted as SMPE standard in 1932), Pathe's 28mm projectors were preferred by most home-cinema enthusiasts in the USA, Europe and Australia. The Thomas A. Edison company is closely associated with the early history of Australian cinema. Australia's first cinematic experience was via an Edison Kinetoscope. On 30 November 1894 this machine made its Australian public debut when James McMahon opened a "Kinetoscope parlour" at 148 Pitt Street, Sydney, only a year after the very first Kinetoscope parlour was opened in New Jersey, USA. This early Kinetoscope however was not a projector, instead the public queued up and individually viewed a moving image through a small view-finder. In 1895, thirty years before Al Johnson burst into song in the Jazz singer (1928), another significant Edison invention made its Australian debut - the Kinetophone - a combination phonograph and kinetoscope that produced both images and sound. By the turn of the century these early Edison kinetoscopes were superseded by Lumiere cinematographe projector technology, which the Thomas A. Edison company soon incorporated into a new generation of Kinetoscopes, of which the Edison Home Kinetoscope is an example. Thomas A. Edison Inc. products including, electric meters, light bulbs, phonographs and telephones were widely distributed in Australia and it is likely that this particular Kinetoscope was imported and distributed from the Thomas A. Edison Ltd headquarters at 364 - 372 Kent street, Sydney.