Edison Opens Black Maria: Birth of the Film Studio

The world’s first building designed solely for making movies looked like a coffin on a turntable. Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, completed in February 1893 at his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory, was a cramped, tar-paper-covered room with a retractable roof that opened to let sunlight hit the performers inside. The entire structure sat on a circular track so it could rotate to follow the sun throughout the day. Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson needed the studio to produce short film strips for the Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device Edison was developing alongside the motion picture camera called the Kinetograph. The project had begun in 1888 when Edison filed a caveat describing a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." Construction of the Black Maria started in December 1892 and cost just $637.67. The first public demonstration of films shot in the Black Maria took place in May 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Early subjects included vaudeville performers, boxing matches, strongmen, dancers, and segments from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Fred Ott’s Sneeze, filmed in January 1894, became one of the first motion pictures registered for copyright at the Library of Congress. The performers worked in brutal conditions. The black interior absorbed heat, and on sunny days the studio became an oven, earning it the nickname after the paddy wagons of the era. The Black Maria launched an industry. Within two years, Edison was producing and distributing films commercially. By 1895, the Lumiere brothers in France had developed a superior projection system that allowed audiences to watch films together rather than peering into individual machines. Edison had invented the factory; others would invent the theater.