After a much needed heavy rain, today is a brilliant day here in New England. The trees are at their peak; the sky today was a brilliant blue; and the air tonight is clear but cold. It’s beautiful but it’s a poignant beauty because of the cooler temperatures, the soon-to-fall leaves, and the increasingly short days all portend the onset of winter and with it, the end of the outdoor social distancing that has allowed us to interact with other people.

As we prepare to hunker down, we, like many people, are asking for recommendations for movies and shows to watch in the coming weeks and months. That request brings me to today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp issued in 1947, it portrays Thomas Alva Edison, who, October 18, 1888 he filed a “patent caveat” announcing his intention to seek a patent for a machine that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” He called the machine a “Kinetoscope,” a name he derived from Greek roots kineto- (“movement”) and scopos (“to view”). In short, he was going to invent a movie camera and projector.

While Edison seems to have conceived the basic idea, initiated the experiments, and made key decision, the bulk of the actual work was done the bulk of the work was done by a team headed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a talented Edison assistant who had a background as a photographer. Their work also drew on advances made by others, particularly the development of emulsion coated celluloid film.

It took until 1893 before the first public demonstration of the machine, which allowed one person at a time to view a film through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. (Edison also received a patent for the machine in 1893). A year later, in 1894, a public Kinetoscope parlor, essentially the first commercial movie house, opened in New York City on the corner of Broadway and 27th Street. The venue had ten machines, set up in parallel rows of five, each showing a different movie lasting less than a minute. For 25 cents a viewer could see all the films in either row; half a dollar gave access to the entire bill. The machines were purchased from a new company that had contracted with Edison. The short films were shot at a studio that Edison had established in West Orange (but later moved to New York City.

(As an aside, when I was young my mother took me a few times to the West Orange facility, which is a National Historical Park. I can’t remember much about those visits except that I remember that I enjoyed the visits – probably an early sign of my interest in random Americana, certainly not a sign that I had any technological or technical aptitude.)

Initially, the Kinetoscope viewing parlor was successful and soon similar venues had opened in many other cities. However, in a short time others began building rudimentary movie projects that built on the Kinetoscope’s basic approach -conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.

Edison also moved in this direction. And in 1898, he sued two other firms, including one started by Dickson who had left Edison’s company, for patent infringement. Four years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Edison only owned rights to the sprocket system that moved perforated film through the camera, not the entire concept of the movie camera.

In 1909, Edison and Biograph joined forces with other filmmakers to create the Motion Pictures Patents Company, an organization devoted to protecting patents and keeping other players from entering the film industry. In 1917, the Supreme Court dissolved the trust, and the Edison Company – which had also produced over 1,000 short films—left the film business entirely. Edison, who received more than 1,000 patents in his lifetime, died in 1931.

So we should thank Edison for laying the groundwork that lets us watch Netflix (or other streaming services) during the pandemic. It took a while, but that technology is getting closer to a dream that Edison outlined in his initial patent caveats: creating a machine that did such a good job of combining images and sound so “we may see & hear a whole Opera as perfectly as if actually present.”

However, we probably shouldn’t take his recommendations about what to watch. After all, Edison said that “Birth of a Nation” was his favorite movie. He also said that movies with sound had “spoiled everything. [because] they concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf.”

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, send along any viewing recommendations for the coming months, and work for peace.