Explore our collection items related to early motion pictures from Muybridge's pioneering work in photographic studies of motion to kinetoscopes and mutoscopes. At his research lab, Thomas Edison—alongside photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and machinist Charles Brown—developed the kinetograph, a motion picture camera, and the kinetoscope, a viewing device. In 1985, Dickson co-founded the American Mutoscope Company with Elias Koopman, Herman Casler, and Henry Marvin, to manufacture a motion picture viewer called the mutoscope and produce films. Mutoscope viewers were found in many amusement areas and arcades until at least the 1960s. The Mutoscope Collection in the National Museum of American History’s Photographic History Collection is among the most significant of its kind in any museum.
