Edison's Black Maria

The Black Maria (pronounced ma-RYE-uh) was Thomas Edison's movie production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It is widely referred to as "America's First Movie Studio." In 1893, the world's first film production studio, the Black Maria, or the Kinetographic Theater, was built on the grounds of Edison's laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, for the purpose of making film strips for the Kinetoscope. In early May of 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Edison conducted the world's first public demonstration of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria, with a Kinetoscope viewer. The exhibited film showed three people pretending to be blacksmiths.
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