On this day in 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway and
Gray, demonstrate their “Panopticon,” the first movie projector developed  in the United States.

Although motion pictures had been shown in the United States
for several years using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, the films
could only be viewed one at a time in a peep-show box and not
projected to a large audience. Brothers Grey and Otway Latham,
the founders of a company that produced and exhibited films of
prize fights using the Kinetoscope, called on Woodville, their
father, and W.K.L. Dickson, an assistant in the Edison Lab, to
help them develop a device that would project life-sized images 
onto a screen in order to attract larger audiences.

 

  The Lathams: Otway, Woodville, Gray.