Edison Studios

Edison Studios was an American motion picture production company owned by the Edison Company of inventor Thomas Edison. The studio made close to 1,200 films as the Edison Manufacturing Company (1894–1911) and Thomas A. Edison, Inc. (1911–1918) until the studio's closing in 1918. Of that number, 54 were feature length, the remainder were shorts.

Its first production facility, Edison's Black Maria studios in West Orange, New Jersey, was built in the winter of 1892–93. The second facility, a glass-enclosed rooftop studio built at 41 East 21st Street in Manhattan's entertainment district, opened in 1901. In 1907, Edison had new facilities built on Decatur Avenue and Oliver Place in the Bronx.

Edison himself played no direct part in the making of his studio's films beyond being the owner, and appointing William Gilmore as vice-president and general manager. Edison's assistant William Kennedy Dickson, who supervised the development of Edison's motion picture system, produced the first Edison films intended for public exhibition, 1893–95. After Dickson's departure for Biograph in 1895, he was replaced as director of production by cameraman William Heise, then from 1896 to 1903 by James H. White. When White left to supervise Edison's European interests in 1903, he was replaced by William Markgraf (1903–1904), then Alex T. Moore (1904–1909), and Horace G. Plimpton (1909–1915).

thumb|A re-enactment of the The first commercially exhibited motion pictures in the United States......
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