"When considering the important figures in the early history of film, Thomas Edison Emerges primarily as a crass businessman who benefited from the innovations of his employees and was concerned primarily with financial reward and public acclaim. It is therefore the Europeans-The Lumiere brothers, Georges Melies, Cecil Hepworth, and George Smith-Who deserve greatest credit for the development of this new art form".
At the end of the Nineteenth Century and at the beginning of the Twentieth, the film industry was just starting to bloom. It started because a man made a bet that all of a horse's feet left the ground during a gallop. A European scientist proved it. All of these men in some way contributed to the start of the film industry, as we know it today. Each one contributed something significant in his own way. Edison, motivated by money, helped start the American movie industry by mass-producing movies to feed to the audience. The Lumiere's developed the cinematographe so that filmmakers could travel outside to photograph the world. And Melies developed the use of having multiple scenes and using special effects and editing to enhance the movies.
Tomas Edison told one of his of his developers, William Dickson to develop a machine that could "visually accompany his beloved phonograph (Giannetti: 5)." Dickson developed the kinetoscope, and soon afterwards parlors opened where people could view the short movies for 25 cents a pop. Edison made nickel slots on the machines to increase profits for his own interests and soon after he also made his own studio and started cranking out movies of his own. By doing this, Edison inspired competition. Edison's main triumph came in film comes from his snowballing affect on the industry, which led to Armat's discovery of the Vitascope, which could project motion pictures onto walls. Even though Edison's main motivation was money, because he did not actually believe that films had any real worth, he still helped to create a new medium and art.