On April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway
and Gray, demonstrated 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, 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 their father, Woodville, and W.K.L.
Dickson, an assistant in the Edison Laboratory, to help them
develop a device that would project life-sized images onto a
screen in order to attract larger audiences.
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