| 1888 |
 Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
| January 10 |
Le Prince is granted a US patent (no 376247) for
a 16-lens motion picture camera and projector. |
â October |
| April 24 |
Eastman Kodak Company is founded by George Eastman (1854-1932). Within a year he perfects
and markets the first affordable camera using roll film. |
|
| May 3 |
Kodak name is registered in the UK. |
cf, â September 4 |
| May 16 |
Flat gramophone disc is demonstrated by Emile
Berliner to members of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. His technique involves coating
a zinc disc with a wax resist into which the stylus cuts the recording. The disc is then etched
in acid to cut the recording into the zinc. Berliner intends to use the electrotyping process to
make copies of the zinc master disc and demonstrates a copper duplicate. |
|
| June 16 |
 Allegedly after five solid days and nights of
work, Edison and his associates complete a prototype of an improved
phonograph. Like the Bell and Tainter graphophone, it now has an electric
motor and uses wax cylinders. The event is commemorated in one of the most
famous photographs associated with invention. |
|
| June 29 |
Edison's foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, makes a cylinder recording
in the Crystal Palace, London of a 4,000-strong choir performing Handel's Israel in Egypt
at a distance of more than 100 yards from the phonograph. This is the oldest known music recording. |
|
| July 14 |
North American Phonograph Company is founded by Jesse Lippincott to market
phonographs and graphophones. The company sells regional franchises to lease equipment, sharing
the $40 annual rental per machine with the franchisee. Lippincott, a Pittsburgh businessman, who
has just made $1m from the sale of his controlling stake in the Rochester Tumbler Company, spends
$200,000 to become sole licensee of the American Graphophone Company, which continues to make
players that Lippincott markets. Shortly after, Lippincott spends $500,000 on acquiring Edison’s
patents in the phonograph, although Edison retains manufacturing rights. This gives Lippincott control
of the entire US cylinder sound recording business. However, Lippincott shares Edison’s view of
the invention as a dictating machine. Columbia Phonograph Company,
which services the District of Columbia, Delaware and Maryland area, is one of 30 licensees. |
|
| August |
First photography on film by John Carbutt in the USA, using Kodak equipment invented
by George Eastman. |
|
| September 4 |
Kodak name is registered in the USA. |
cf, á May 3 |
| |
Edison meets Muybridge and becomes interested in developing a visual recording
machine similar to the Zoöpraxiscope. |
|
| October 17 |
Edison files a caveat at the US Patent Office for an optical phonograph, with
images only 1/32 inch wide. Edison's claim is that it will 'do for the eye what the
phonograph does for the ear'. |
|
| October |
 Le Prince shoots experimental
film footage in Leeds, England, on paper strips 54mm wide and projected using a Maltese cross mechanism. |
Some of these films can be viewed on and downloaded from the website of the National
Museum of Photography, Film and Television [Click on picture for link]. |
| l |
Edison attempts to raise capital for phonograph development from New York investment
bank J & W Seligman & Company but failure of the working model to work leads nowhere. |
à 1926 December 7 |
| l |
 Wordsworth Donnisthorpe and W C Crofts make a
film camera that takes pictures in a circular frame. |
à 1891 |
| |
Electric motor, using AC power, is invented by Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) in US. |
|
| l |
Pianist Josef Hofmann, aged 12, visits Edison’s laboratories and makes some
phonograph cylinder recordings—the first by a recognised performer. Soon after, celebrated
conductor Hans von Bülow faints when he hears the playback of a Chopin mazurka he has just recorded. |
 A Punch cartoon satirises this idea. |
| l |
Wilhelm Hallwachs develops Heinrich Hertz's work on the
photoelectric effect, observing that when illuminated
with ultraviolet light, a negative charged, well-insulated body loses its charge. |
|
| |
Heinrich Hertz demonstrates the practical possibility of radio transmission. |
|
