A century ago three young men trekked from Chicago to Waukegan to show off a new gizmo. In a darkened room, in front of a crowd of friends and business associates, they placed the elongated apparatus on beer kegs, hooked it up to an electrical extension from a street lamp, then aimed it at the wall. Illuminated images started to flicker and move across the wall. Was this the debut of the first motion-picture projector?
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Edison and his assistants, by the early 1890s, had invented the kinetoscope viewer, which one person at a time used by looking through a peephole. “It wasn’t meant for public screening of films,” says Williams. “Edison was a control freak. He thought he could make more money pay-per-view.” The seven pristine kinetoscopes in Williams’s collection were rescued from penny arcades popular around the turn of the century. Another of Edison’s brilliant ideas was to put holes on the borders of 35-millimeter celluloid stock so that the film could be wound through the camera. Williams thinks that Chicago inventor Edward Amet, who had already come up with a slide projector using a sprocket mechanism, “put two and two together” to create the Magniscope he took to Waukegan. Shortly afterward Edison, sensing the commercial potential of public shows, answered with his own version, the Vitascope, which debuted in April of 1896. That, Williams says with dismay, is “the date in the record book.”
Indeed, for a long time many movie merchants worked out of headquarters lined up along Film Row, north of Roosevelt on Wabash. Alvin Roebuck was one. “He sold his interest in Sears, Roebuck and put all his money in the projector business. His company made this Motiograph in the teens.” Williams shows off a small trunk neatly packed with components of a projector ready for assembly. “It was designed for the traveling showman to take from small town to small town. He would pitch a tent or rent the front of a store and put up a white sheet before the front row. The projector came in two versions: one used electricity and the other burned lime. Fire hazards were a serious problem in those early days when the film stock was nitrate.”
Last year Williams bought the century-old building on Erie Street that originally housed Mother Cabrini’s Assumption School. He’s put up all the money himself so far, including the cost of shipping the entire collection from his Victorian house in Joliet. Some of the museum’s displays are designed to illustrate the technological evolution of the projector and the camera from the earliest inventions by Edison and French pioneer Louis Lumiere to today’s high-tech equipment. “The idea is that the evolution happened in increments,” Williams says. “An alteration to the lens here and there, or a slightly different shutter mechanism, and platters instead of reels, xenon lamps instead of carbon-arc lamps. But the basics, believe it or not, have pretty much been the same since the 30s. In fact, the Fine Arts, the 400, and the Three Penny are still using projectors from that period.”
