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Ever since the day as a child I was taken to the London science museum, I have had a fascination for Edison's Kinetoscope machine ,and being told that this was the machine that started the entire film industry as we know it today. Of course from that day I have always dreamt of owning one.
I fought my luck had come up, back in the mid 80s when one came up for sale Christie's auction house, sadly for me it sold for just under half a million, so I went back to dreaming.
About five years ago I decided to have a go at building one from scratch, if I knew then what I now know I wouldn't have bothered as it has been a journey to hell and back.
To start with there is so little information out there about this machine, everywhere on the internet on every site it just the same copy and paste wikipedia entry, there is just no detail, considering the importance of this invention.
Looking back the entire project would have been so much easier if I could of had hands on access to an original machine. I managed to find out that Edison came up with this machine about the same time as the Lumiere brothers invented their Cinematograph machine. Edison only leased out the units to anyone who wish to set up kinetoscope parlor, but never sold them. Only a handful of the machines made their way out of the U.S and these are the the machines that survived, as soon as the word got back that the lumieres had produced a machine that could project film on to a screen ,Edison recalled all of his machines to be able to use the parts from these to produce his kinetoscope projectors, that's why there is only 8 known machines in the world and all of these are housed behind glass.
I started out trying to study low res photos to see how the cabinet was constructed, and this was the start of the problems. My first attempt looked more like Mr Bean has had a go at making it, and it went straight on the bonfire, so I went back to the drawing board.
Fortunately I own a large table CNC router machine so I decided to produce the panels for the cabinet out of one piece of wood, at least by doing this the doors will match exactly the outer frame. After the cabinet was completed this is where the nightmare begins, the mechanism!
I knew from the start that I would need twenty 35mm rollers, a film gate and more importantly a large 35mm sprocket. All of the parts for the mechanism I needed to draw and print on a 3d printer for this to ever work. The rollers were pretty easy to produce but seemed to take forever to print this amount with each one taking about fourteen hours to print.
But the biggest problem was the sprocket, this is not an easy thing to draw on cad software as it needs to be absolutely perfect. Even the pitch of the teeth will affect the way the film is transported over it without it ripping the film to pieces. Before anybody suggest using a projector sprocket these sprockets were very large 180 teeth nothing like a projector sprocket, so I had to produce one from scratch, this took well over a year to complete.
The next problem was synchronizing the transportation of the film with the shutter. Like I said before if only had access to an original machine I could have measured the gears and counted the teeth to get the exact gear ratio, instead this took about another year and a half to complete, by this time I just wanted to put an axe through the top of it never to see it again.
But I persevered with it, the machine is coin activated and runs for one minute using a didital counter and a relay board which shuts the power down when the clock has reached zero. The machine runs fine but still has an issue with the frame slowly running out of rack over the minute run, but hey it works.
For my next project it was to build a Mutoscope machine ( but I think I will give that one a miss. )
Steve.
I fought my luck had come up, back in the mid 80s when one came up for sale Christie's auction house, sadly for me it sold for just under half a million, so I went back to dreaming.
About five years ago I decided to have a go at building one from scratch, if I knew then what I now know I wouldn't have bothered as it has been a journey to hell and back.
To start with there is so little information out there about this machine, everywhere on the internet on every site it just the same copy and paste wikipedia entry, there is just no detail, considering the importance of this invention.
Looking back the entire project would have been so much easier if I could of had hands on access to an original machine. I managed to find out that Edison came up with this machine about the same time as the Lumiere brothers invented their Cinematograph machine. Edison only leased out the units to anyone who wish to set up kinetoscope parlor, but never sold them. Only a handful of the machines made their way out of the U.S and these are the the machines that survived, as soon as the word got back that the lumieres had produced a machine that could project film on to a screen ,Edison recalled all of his machines to be able to use the parts from these to produce his kinetoscope projectors, that's why there is only 8 known machines in the world and all of these are housed behind glass.
I started out trying to study low res photos to see how the cabinet was constructed, and this was the start of the problems. My first attempt looked more like Mr Bean has had a go at making it, and it went straight on the bonfire, so I went back to the drawing board.
Fortunately I own a large table CNC router machine so I decided to produce the panels for the cabinet out of one piece of wood, at least by doing this the doors will match exactly the outer frame. After the cabinet was completed this is where the nightmare begins, the mechanism!
I knew from the start that I would need twenty 35mm rollers, a film gate and more importantly a large 35mm sprocket. All of the parts for the mechanism I needed to draw and print on a 3d printer for this to ever work. The rollers were pretty easy to produce but seemed to take forever to print this amount with each one taking about fourteen hours to print.
But the biggest problem was the sprocket, this is not an easy thing to draw on cad software as it needs to be absolutely perfect. Even the pitch of the teeth will affect the way the film is transported over it without it ripping the film to pieces. Before anybody suggest using a projector sprocket these sprockets were very large 180 teeth nothing like a projector sprocket, so I had to produce one from scratch, this took well over a year to complete.
The next problem was synchronizing the transportation of the film with the shutter. Like I said before if only had access to an original machine I could have measured the gears and counted the teeth to get the exact gear ratio, instead this took about another year and a half to complete, by this time I just wanted to put an axe through the top of it never to see it again.
But I persevered with it, the machine is coin activated and runs for one minute using a didital counter and a relay board which shuts the power down when the clock has reached zero. The machine runs fine but still has an issue with the frame slowly running out of rack over the minute run, but hey it works.
For my next project it was to build a Mutoscope machine ( but I think I will give that one a miss. )
Steve.
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