A team from Eye Filmmuseum offers a short history of the Biograph films and discusses the technical challenges in digitising and restoring the museum’s Biograph 68mm film collection.
68mm Film of Mutoscope and Biograph Company
Invented by W. K. L. Dickson and Herman Casler, the Mutoscope is a coin-operated, hand-cranking viewing device using its unique 68mm large-format unperforated film. Typically 850 individual cards with images of photographic prints are attached to a circular core to give a reel of one-minute long. Dickson and Casler later invented the Biograph camera and projector for film in strips with an approximately 1.35:1 aspect ratio. Fed into the mechanism with rubber bands, the images can be projected onto screen. With an image size six times of 35mm film and a 30 frames-per-second filming and projecting rate, the images are sharper and films seem smoother, making it widely used by 1902.