Thomas A. Edison began thinking about the development of motion pictures in 1888 after studying the successful motion-sequence still photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Around the beginning of 1889, Thomas Edison had conceived the ambitious idea that it would be possible to record a series of motion as seen by the human eye and then play it back in real time. Edison wanted to surpass his predecessors and build a completely new piece of photographic equipment, rather than merely adapting the current forms of photographic equipment. His idea was to build a machine that would do "for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear."

To turn his invention into reality, Edison assigned responsibility for day-to-day development to one of his favorite assistants, a young man named W. K. L. Dickson. By mid-June of 1891, Dickinson produced a series of successful experimental motion pictures that were shown to groups of visitors at the Edison laboratory in New Jersey.

Over the next couple of years Dickson worked to perfect the two basic machines required for successful motion pictures: A device to record moving images, which he and Edison, called the Kinetoscope. A major problem that slowed Dickson's work in the beginning was the nonexistence in the commercial marketplace of another essential invention-motion picture film stock. After Eastman Kodak began supplying quantities of reliable film stock in the fall of 1893, the road to commercial development of the movie was opened.