Today is the birthday of George Kirke Spoor (1872-1953).
Starting in 1894, Chicago-based Spoor was among the very earliest of motion picture exhibitors in the world. His first device, the Magiscope, created with inventor Edward Hill Amet, put him in direct competition with Edison and the Lumière brothers. Spoor and Amet are also credited with creating the first newsreels, some of them real, like footage of President McKinley’s inauguration in 1897, and some of them faked, like Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898. In 1899, he renamed his device the Kinodrome and showed films in vaudeville theatres in Chicago, New Orleans, St Louis and Kansas City and expanded from there. These early pictures were all about five minutes long, the perfect length for a vaudeville bill. From the turn of the century through the death of vaudeville in 1932, films were an integral part of the vaudeville experience. Eventually the films simply took over. In 1907, Spoor would partner with Broncho Billy Anderson to found Essanay Studios, most famous for producing the films of Charlie Chaplin in 1915. In the 1920s, he helped invent one of the cinema’s first widescreen processes, known as “Natural Vision”. His last film as producer (uncredited) was Danger Lights (1930), with Robert Armstrong, Jean Arthur and Hugh Herbert.
For more on early film history see my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc
(Travalanche) 