GROUP 3

From Static to Moving Images

Several inventions intersected and gave rise to film as a mass medium. George Eastman invented
the film and built a company that would be known as Kodak.

George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an

American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company
and popularized the use of roll film, helping to bring photography to
the mainstream.

But it was Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, who
turned the use of the photographic film into a material that can be
moved in front of a lens at a constant speed to result into several
photographs, each one different from the other one because of a
slight change in the movement of the subject. When that strip was
developed and viewed by the naked eye, it gave the illusion of a
George Eastman moving object.

Two Frenchman, Louis and Augusto Lumiére, further developed the technology of film
projectors. Edison would still improve the technology developed by the Lumiére brothers with
large screen projecting.

By 1896, the Edison vitascope was on public debut in New

York, where it showed a film entitled Roughed Sea at
Dover by Robert Paul.

• Rough Sea at Dover is an 1895 British short black-and-

white silent film, shot by Birt Acres Acres shot the film in
mid-1895, with a camera designed with and built by Robert
W. Paul, their original intention being to supply films for
viewing in the Edison kinetoscope.

The audience was so stunned with the images of waves crashing into the sea, it was reported that
they were constantly pulling back into their seats, afraid that they will get crashed by the waves.
It was such a novelty and the large screen projection enabled massive audiences to watch it at the
same time––a starkly different practice from the newspaper that was held by a single reader, and
perhaps passed on the next individual who expressed interest to read the current news.

While the newspaper catered to people’s desire of information, the rise of film addressed an
emerging worldview that would define much of modernity’s rise––the demarcation of people
lives between work and leisure. Film represented leisure, a time distinct from work and
livelihood. It must be noted that leisure is not meant here as a novelty in the emerging lifestyles
because the elites, those who did not have work to survive, have always enjoyed leisure.
It was the working class who has now added another dimension to their qoutidian lives––a time
out of work, a time carved to enjoy entertainment forms which are also peddled as commodities
in the market. Thus, it was also another arena whereby they can spend the incomes they have
earned from their work.

Radio and Television followed very closely. By 1907, the word “television” was already used in
a magazine called the Scientific American. By 1928, the first telecast of a television program
took place, transmitting from experimental studio of General Electric in New York City.
By 1930, the Radio Corporation of America introduced electronic scanning, a much improve
technology from the mechanical scanning introduced earlier. By 1939, US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt became the first president to appear on the tube.

In Europe, the Nazi authorities in Germany Operated the world’s first regular television service,
using it as a platform of propaganda.

Commercial Television came into being in the United States only in 1946. In the Philippines,
commercial television was launched in 1953, but as early as 1946, there were already
explorations on the technology of broadcasting.

In 1946, James Lindenberg (Father of Philippine

Television), an American Engineer, began assembling
transmitters in Bolinao, Pangasinan. He was not fully
successful with his attempt to establish a television
station but soon he was able to team up with Antonio
Quirino, and together, they would establish the Alto
Broadcasting System (ABS) where he would serve
as the general manager. Their first official telecast
was in October 23,1953.
James Lindenberg Antonio Quirino
•In April 1958, another TV network opened, and this
was the Chronicle Broadcasting Network (CBN), established as a
radio medium in 1956 by businessmen Eugenio and Fernando Lopez. In the same year, CBN
brought ABS from Judge Quirino, and merged the two companies under the name Bolinao
Electronics Corporation, which was incidentally the former name of ABS.