Biograph Company

The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Harry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey on December 30, 1895. The firm manufactured the Mutoscope and made flip-card movies for it as a rival to Edison's Kinetoscope for individual "peep shows", making the company Edison's chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In summer 1896, the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co. In 1899, it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1908 to simply the Biograph Company.

To avoid violating Edison's motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 to 1902 used a large-format film, measuring 2+23⁄32 inches (69 mm) wide, with an image area of 2 by 2+1⁄2 inches (51 mm × 64 mm), four times that of Edison's 35 mm format. The camera used friction feed instead of Edison's sprocket feed to guide the film to the aperture. The camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second. A patent case victory in March 1902 allowed Biograph and other producers and distributors to use the less expensive 35 mm format without an Edison license, although Biograph did not completely phase out 68 mm production until autumn of 1903.

Biograph offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format. Commenting on the 1902 Biograph Company short film The Flying Train, Ashley Swinnerton of the Museum of Modern Art said that the 68 mm format has become "of particular interest to researchers... because the large image area affords stunning visual clarity and quality."

Biograph films before 1903, were mostly "actualities," documentary film footage of actual persons, places and events, each film usually less than two minutes long, such as the one of the Empire State Express, which premiered on October 12, 1896, in New York City. The occasional narrative film, usually a comedy, was typically shot in one scene, with no editing. Spurred on by competition from Edison and British and European producers, Biograph production from 1903 onward was increasingly dominated by narratives. As the stories became more complex the films became longer, with multiple scenes to tell the story, although an individual scene was still usually presented in one shot without editing. Biograph's production of actualities ended by 1908 in favor of the narrative film.