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8 A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
United States when the kinetoscope reached the market, and movie peep-shows soon were everywhere installed by the side of talkie cabinets in the remodeled storerooms known as "phonograph parlors." Pictures of life in action attracted more attention and produced more entertainment than sounds transmitted through ear-pieces, and parlor proprietors noticed that the kinetoscope brought more customers than the phonograph.*
Men with keener commercial sense than Edison, observing the enthusiasm of peep-show patrons, saw a field of money-making. This novelty, they believed, would yield profitable harvests of small coins, and if Edison was too busy to exploit his kinetoscope business, they were willing to grasp the opportunity he was neglecting. There soon appeared in America several peep-show cabinets with names, derived from Greek and Latin sources, suggesting motion, life, action, vision, record, or graphic portrayal — such as muto-scope, bio-scope, bio-graph.
The most alert competitors of the kinetoscope were the men who devised the "mutoscope," a peep-show cabinet, and later the "biograph," a system of screen movies. Biograph, as the company was known after a short time, was formed by Henry N. Marvin, scientist and college professor; Dickson, whom Edison had placed in charge of the experiments that produced the kinetoscope; E. B. Koopman, a dealer in small patented articles; and Herman Casler, an electrician and machinist. The mutoscope and the biograph harvested a large crop of small coins, and within a
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* There are so many claims and counter-claims of priority of invention in motion pictures, that I have simplified the story by presenting only those events to which the passage of time has given importance. For example: In England, in or about 1890, several men attempted to create movies by rolling film from one spool to another, and their experiments afforded a foundation for declarations that they were as early as Edison in the field. However, no film, slipping from spool to spool, was uniformly successful. Edison was the "father of the movies" because of his use of perforated film, moved by a sprocket wheel, which insured regularity in starting and stopping for the fraction of a second while photographs were being registered or, later, projected to the screen.