The Flicker That Started It All: Monkeyshines No. 1 and the Birth of American Cinema
November 21, 1890 – West Orange, New Jersey
Deep inside Thomas Edison’s sprawling “Invention Factory” on Valley Road, two men hunched over a strange wooden box the size of a small trunk. A strip of sensitive celluloid whirred past a shutter at forty-six frames per second. In front of a stark black backdrop, laboratory assistant John Ott performed a playful salute and waved his arms while engineer William K.L. Dickson cranked the handle of the world’s first successful motion-picture camera. The result was Monkeyshines No. 1 – a ghostly, 11-second loop of motion that survives today as the earliest known American film still in existence.
The Men Behind the Machine
Though the invention is forever tied to Edison’s name, the real architects of moving pictures were his employees William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and William Heise. Edison had sketched the broad concept in 1888, a device that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” – but it was Dickson, a Scottish-born photographer and electrical wizard, who turned theory into reality.
Between late 1889 and November 1890, Dickson’s team shot at least three “Monkeyshines” cylinders (the term was lab slang for playful experiments). The first two are lost forever, destroyed by the fragile Eastman Kodak celluloid that peeled and cracked within months. Monkeyshines No. 1 and No. 2 (or possibly No. 3) survived only because someone thoughtfully transferred the delicate strips to more stable stock decades later.
What the Film Actually Shows
Do not expect cinematic grandeur. The surviving fragment is crude even by 1890 standards: A white, ghostly figure (almost certainly lab assistant John Ott) against a pitch-black background Arms waving, a hat tipped, a mock salute Severe flicker caused by the hand-cranked camera’s inconsistent speed
Horizontal scratches from the primitive sprocket system that yanked the film through the gate
Yet for those eleven seconds, the impossible had happened: human motion had been captured, preserved, and could be replayed at will.
The Kinetoscope Revolution That Followed
Monkeyshines was never meant for public eyes. It was proof-of-concept for Edison’s forthcoming Kinetoscope – the peep-show parlor machines that would debut in 1893 and ignite America’s love affair with moving pictures. Within five years of that November afternoon, audiences from Brooklyn to San Francisco were paying a nickel to watch boxing cats, Annabelle’s butterfly dance, and Sandow the strongman flexing his muscles, all shot on the same 1½-inch-wide celluloid format pioneered in the Monkeyshines tests.
A Century-Plus Legacy
Today, the surviving print of Monkeyshines No. 1 resides in the Library of Congress, carefully preserved on 35mm safety film. When it was screened publicly for the first time in decades at the 2019 “To Save and Project” festival at the Museum of Modern Art, the audience sat in reverent silence, then erupted in applause for a blurry white blob waving hello from 1890.In an era when billions of hours of video are uploaded every day, it is almost incomprehensible that this flickering salute, shot on a November day in a New Jersey laboratory, is the oldest moving image of an American still with us. It is not just a film. It is the exact moment the 20th century learned how to remember itself in motion.
Happy 135th birthday to American cinema. The monkeyshines worked.