William Kennedy Dickson

William Kennedy Dickson was a Scottish-born inventor who led the motion-picture research at Thomas Edison's laboratory in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Working under Edison's direction, Dickson is credited as the primary inventor of the Kinetograph, an early motion-picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, a peep-hole viewing device that let a single viewer watch a short strip of moving film, both introduced commercially in the early 1890s. Dickson also helped develop 35mm perforated film stock, a format whose basic dimensions influenced motion-picture film for decades afterward, and he later left Edison's laboratory to help found the Biograph Company, a rival early film studio.