12 Facts About Biograph Company

Biograph Company, known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916.

Biograph Company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film.

Biograph Company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co.

Biograph Company offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.

Biograph Company moved in 1906 to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street near Union Square, a building that was razed in the 1960s.

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Biograph Company moved again in 1913, as it entered feature-film production, to a new state-of-the-art studio on 175th Street in the Bronx.

Many early movie stars were Biograph performers, including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Arthur V Johnson, Florence Auer, Robert G Vignola, Owen Moore, Alan Hale Sr.

Biograph Company then made the first film ever in Hollywood called In Old California, a Latino melodrama about the early days of Mexico-owned California.

Griffith and the Biograph Company troupe filmed other short movies at various locations, then traveled back to New York.

In December 1908 Biograph joined Edison in forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers.

Biograph Company spent the remainder of the silent era reissuing its old films, and leasing its Bronx studio to other producers.

From 1954 to 1957, Sterling Television Company distributed a package of 100 quarter-hour television shows titled Movie Museum, featuring Biograph, Edison and other early films from the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House.