Antonia Dickson: The kineto-phonograph and the telephony of the future

Abstract

ABSTRACT We already know that Antonia Dickson co-wrote The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, published as a Raff and Gammon pamphlet and now considered the ‘first’ history of motion pictures. The late Paul Spehr was one of Antonia’s champions, and he suggested what a more careful reading of the prose style of that ‘history’ might reveal about the likely author. Also, a comparison with W.K.L. Dickson’s 1933 version of that history – published 30 years after Antonia’s death and after he had moved to the UK – reveals distinct differences not only in prose style but also in the conceptualization of the invention. Here is a re-introduction to Antonia Dickson relative to her talents (music historian, art historian, pianist, poet, translator, popular science writer) and achievements (including co-authorship of a biography of Thomas Edison), the single-authored ‘Nine Hundred and Fifty Miles by Telephone’, in Cassier’s Magazine (November 1892), written after she witnessed the first successful telephone call between New York and Chicago. Then, in ‘Wonders of the Kinetoscope’ from 1895 she published her own account of how moving pictures worked, significant for its grasp of how the device functioned. From there I offer another angle on the contradictory accounts of invention published in the newly illustrated engineering journals of the late nineteenth century.