Who invented movie projectors?

Answer 1

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison did not invent the first Motion Picture Projector. There are many contenders, some depending on how "motion picture" is defined, but Edison is the worst of all possible answers.

As the Richmond Telegram and The Photographic Times documented, in June 1894 Charles Francis Jenkins visited his boyhood home of Richmond, Indiana to exhibit his "motion picture projecting box" to his family, friends and newsmen. The Phantoscope, as he called it, projected a butterfly dance as performed by a vaudeville dancer, which Jenkins had filmed himself. This was the earliest documented showing of a film before an audience.

In the fall of 1895, Jenkins and a partner, Thomas Armat, gave a demonstration of projected motion pictures at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta with a modified Phantoscope, for which each later tried to take sole credit. (Both are given credit on the patent, applied for in August 1895 and approved in July 1897.) Armat took the machine to Edison, hoping to get it manufactured, and expecting eventually to have his name on it. Edison promised credit, but suggested that it would sell better with his own name initially, with due credit to be given later. That never happened, but the machine was produced with only minor modifications as the Edison Vitascope. Edison's famous April 20, 1896 public exhibition with the Vitascope was the second, not the first modern public motion picture show.

I emphasize modern in the previous because the Jenkins-Armat projector was not the first to project moving images. Projected moving images had been around at least since the 1860's, and possibly earlier. Perhaps the first to project moving photographic images was Edward Muybridge in 1878 with a machine he called the "Zoopraxiscope," which he took on a very successful lecture tour to Europe.

An earlier form of lantern slide, the Choreutoscope, used a maltese cross-type intermittent to project simple animations with a magic lantern as early as 1866. This is by no means a complete list, but it should put to rest any claims for Edison's priority.