This may not be the best shot but a blurry footage of an engineer standing in front of a camera is likely to be the first film ever shot in the US.
Called "Monkeyshines", the film was created by engineers William Heise and William K L Dickson as they worked on the first device for viewing motion pictures.
They made the movie for Edison Labs in 1889 or 1890 while working with world renowned US inventor Thomas Alva Edison to develop and test the Kinetoscope - an early motion picture viewing device considered to be the precursor to movie projectors.
The kinetoscope created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.
The full film - 56 seconds long - shows a lab worker in front of the camera.
A series of three films was made. All three films show a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and are only a few seconds long, said a Daily Mail report.
The maverick Edison developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
--Indo-Asian News Sevice
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