A Slippery Job: Travelling Exhibitors in Early Cinema by Deac Rossell [Draft Copy; Published in Visual Delights. Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19 Century, ed. Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (Trowbridge, Wilts.: 2000: th Flicks Books) pp. 50 - 60. The subject for this paper came about during an attempt to sort out in some logical way the many different moving picture projection machines offered on the market before 1900. Thomas Edison, of course, had famously rejected the idea of moving picture projection when it was suggested to him after the appearance of his Kinetoscope peep-show machine; Edison, whose principal income had always come from manufacturing apparatus for telegraphy, electrical transmission, and business dictation, thought that if he were to build a projection apparatus, there would be a use for “maybe about ten of them in the whole United States,” and preferred to stay with 1 his single-viewer Kinetoscope. Edison was (once again) wrong about moving pictures, but even so, if not just ten, why were there so many different machines on the market in the late 1890's, manufactured by scores of companies in Europe and America? How were these machines used? By whom? What caused the demand? How, in fact, had moving pictures evolved from a mechanical novelty into a lasting and expressive medium? The most useful theoretical tool with which to examine these questions critically comes from recent work in the sociology of the history of technology. This approach 2 asserts the interpretive flexibility of a technological artifact, i.e., that an artifact can have different meanings to different people. A widely known example of this interpretive flexibility is another of Edison’s inventions, the phonograph: to Edison it was a machine to be used in the office for business dictation and to increase efficiency; many others saw it as an instrument that could reproduce music for both home and public entertainment. The interpretive flexibility of an artifact further implies that different social groups are involved with it; moreover, that each social group can and does influence not only the use, marketing, or acceptance of an artifact, but influences even its specific design and construction. Among the relevant social groups involved with early moving pictures were magic lantern manufacturers, lanternists, optical suppliers, mechanical engineers, magicians, theatre owners and impresarios, varieté artists, travelling showmen, photographers and photographic manufacturers, scientists, lecturers, concert promoters, and others. Each group brought their own skills, business habits, implicit knowledge, and social connections to moving pictures at the turn of the century. When film historians discuss early exhibition, and the needs and practises of exhibitors, they do so in two broadly defined categories, discriminating between travelling exhibitors and exhibitions in fixed theatres. The appearance of moving pictures as an element in varieté theatres, music halls and, briefly, as an interlude in theatrical and concert halls has been the most thoroughly examined of these two modes of exhibition, since these established businesses produced the most easily accessible documentary records for later historians, through the survival of their advertisements, press reports, and business papers. Steady contracts with a chain or circuit of theatres were the most desirable and most remunerative for early film companies; some have been well studied such as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s contract with B. F. Keith’s theatre circuit or Oskar Messter’s 3