Today in Movies. And Bicycles.

On this date, August 24, in 1891, Thomas Edison patented the motion picture camera. In less than 10 years, motion pictures became a massive entertainment industry, with single-viewer Kinetoscopes giving way to films projected for mass audiences. The Edison Manufacturing Co. not only designed and built the machines for filming and projecting movies, but also produced films for public viewing, many of which have been preserved and are available from the U.S. Historical Archive.

One of the earliest known films, shot by Edison himself, is this surprisingly contemporary demonstration of rad bike tricks. The Edison Catalog summarized the short film this way: "Opens with a man riding a bicycle in a backwards circle...He dismounts, then remounts the cycle and rides in a forwards circle, pausing and balancing for a moment as he rears up and spins the front wheel. Continuing in the circle, the man moves in front of the handlebars and continues pedaling briefly...the cyclist makes one circle and then pauses center stage as he does a balancing act to the left side of the bike, with his left leg on the pedal and his right on the front wheel." Or as he might have said of the same scene today: "Dang nasty flat land tricks on a fixie, yo."