According to page 63 Our Lives and Times, an Illustrated History. JG Press 2000, a volume I highly recommend to students, Thomas Alva Edison has the first movie studio in 1893, and either developed and patented or bought up all the rights to the film technology of the time. He made deals with feisty companies, like Biograph, and tried to squeeze out the rest of the  competition with legal action.

That's why Hollywood is the movie capital of the world. Some of these smaller companies moved to California to get out of Edison's reach.

Edison was being sued by Fox in 1912 for 'restraint of trade.' He lost the patent war on thecinematograph in 1915.

So, why isn't Edison considered the Father of American Film? Because he was an engineer and not an artist. Edison's company stayed with short films and by 1913, the public was clamouring for longer films. D.W. Griffith gave the public what it wanted, as every film history student knows, with Birth of a Nation. In 1910 Edison's company was hired to make a series of films showcasing Canada's West, in order to attract American immigrants.

Edison touted film as educational medium, saying at one point that film would revolutionize education and make textbooks obsolete. Wrong!

Edison also missed the mark with his electric car. Try as he could, batteries made electric cars impractical. One has to wonder how today's world would be different if Edison had been able to make the electric car the standard. According to an excellent article at this University of Michigan car history website, the electric car, cleaner and less powerful, was marketed at women mostly. Kiss of death, I guess.



Here's a snippet from a 1910 Technical World Magazine.

The garage is located at Llewelyn  Park in New Jersey. and Mr. Edison has designed this structure and arranged its equipment as up to date practice for charging vehicles equipped with his new battery.  Edison's storage battery not only has greater durability  and out put per pound of battery but eliminates a long list of troubles and diseases inherent in the old type.


MACHINE MADNESS: Inventions of 1910 from Technical World Magazine