Edison patents the Kinetograph, a camera built to take pictures that move

By the late summer of 1897, Thomas Edison's West Orange laboratory had spent years trying to build a device that could record moving images to go along with his phonograph. On August 31, 1897, the U.S. Patent Office granted Edison patent number 609,610 for the Kinetograph, a single-camera device for recording motion pictures. The patent built on his 1891 Kinetoscope viewer and the 1895 Kinetophone, and locked in Edison's claim over the camera technology behind the images. That same month his company began shipping paper prints of its films to Washington for copyright deposit, growing a business only two years old…