The Vitascope Lights Up Herald Square

On April 23, 1896, a crowd packed Koster and Bial's Music Hall on Broadway at 34th Street to watch light thrown against a twenty-foot gilt-framed screen, the first commercial exhibition of projected motion pictures in the country. The machine was the Vitascope, built by Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins out of Jenkins' earlier Phantoscope design, though Edison's manufacturing company agreed to build and distribute it only on condition that it carry his name. The bill that night ran an umbrella dance by two women in pink and blue, a burlesque boxing match, a comic bit called The Monroe Doctrine, a scene from the farce A Milk White Flag, and a British import called Rough Sea at Dover that made the front rows brace as the waves hit the screen. The New York Times sent a reporter who called the whole show wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating. Within a few years that flickering wall on Herald Square had helped spawn a whole new industry, one that would eventually pack up and move to a small town outside Los Angeles.