Siegmund Lubin

Early life

Siegmund Lubin was born in Berlin on April 20, 1851. Or perhaps it was in Hamburg on April 21, 1854. It might even have been Breslau in 1856. All these dates and places he claimed as the circumstances of his birth at various times. Nobody seems to know for sure; Lubin liked to change the details of his origins to suit his audience. What we do know is that he was born Siegmund Lubszynski to Samuel, a successful optician, and Rebecca. Samuel died when Lubin was young, so after school he worked in a chemical factory on the outskirts of Berlin. An accident on the job cost young Siegmund the sight in his right eye, and over time the eyeball sunk in its socket.

At home, Lubin and his brothers manufactured and sold ink. The money he earned enabled him to attend Heidelberg University, from where he graduated with a degree in ophthalmology. It also paid for him to follow his cousin Joseph to America in 1868. In the ‘New World,’ he journeyed by train from New York to San Francisco intending to sell “tin pins and earrings” to the Native Americans. It was a doomed venture that ended in failure and a boat trip back to Germany.

He returned to America in 1876, where Cousin Joseph once again welcomed him and took him to his lodgings in New Haven, Connecticut. There he met his wife to be, Annie Abrams, the daughter of Joseph’s landlady. The couple married in October 1882 and went on the road together. Lubin sold eyeglasses at fairs and expositions around the country until Annie fell pregnant. Times were so hard that at one point he had to sell his trousers to a Native American to raise the money for a bed for the night.

Annie gave birth to a daughter, Edith Southern, while Lubin was at the Louisville Exposition of 1883. When Annie insisted they settle down now that they had a child, they chose Philadelphia. They lived in a single boarding-house room, and Lubin sold his glasses on the street, offering a complete service for $1. He saved what he could, and the young family moved into a small apartment above Lubin’s first optical shop at 237 North Eighth Street. Once established, he hired an assistant, John J. Frawley, who remained with him for the next thirty years. A gifted technician, Frawley registered several patents in his employer’s name, including pivoting nose pads for spectacles.

Lubin returned to his itinerant lifestyle, travelling the country to sell his wares at fairs and expositions while Annie looked after the shop. On one of these expeditions, he became interested in the emerging technology of moving pictures. Noting the skyrocketing popularity of song slides in vaudeville theatres, Lubin began producing magic lantern and song slides for local theatres. This expansion of his activities called for larger premises, so around 1890, he moved his operation to a three-storey property at 21 South Eighth Street.

Early film career

At the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago, Lubin encountered Eadweard Muybridge’s demonstration of ‘animal locomotion’ in his ‘Zoopraxographical Hall.’ Muybridge’s sequences of projected images fired Lubin’s imagination. “He showed a horse walking by stereopticon pictures shown rapidly one after the other,” Lubin later remembered. “I started to experiment with the idea then.” For the next two years, he endeavoured to invent a motion picture camera without success until he met C. Francis Jenkins at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in the summer of 1895.

In December of that year, Jenkins demonstrated the projecting machine he called the ‘Projecting Phantoscope’ at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, just a block from Lubin’s shop. Jenkins lost his rights to the Phantoscope after its co-inventor, Thomas Armat, bought him out. With a few minor modifications, the machine was now being marketed as the Vitascope by Edison himself, a situation which left Jenkins embittered against his former partner. He agreed to Lubin’s offer to buy the camera he had used to make the films and even worked with him as a technical consultant.

Lubin made his first short films with Jenkins’ camera in 1896 and projected them for his neighbours. In the late summer, while on a sales trip to New Orleans, he saw William T. Rock exhibiting motion pictures and appreciated for the first time their enormous commercial potential. With renewed vigour and with the faithful Frawley’s assistance, he built a projector he called the Cineograph. He advertised his invention, marketed by his new company, Life Motion Pictures, in the trade paper the New York Clipper, pursuing an aggressive practice of mass marketing. More than any of his competitors, Lubin understood how important effective advertising was to the success of a business. He could also offer exhibitors a wider variety of subjects than his rivals, thanks to his habit of buying every film they made and passing them off as his own—a practice known as ‘duping.’ To deflect suspicion, he would, like his competitors, insert a message in adverts warning clients against buying copies of ‘his’ films.

These tactics earned Lubin a reputation as a dishonest and unethical businessman—a perception he reinforced by advertising a re-enactment of the championship fight between ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons as the real thing. Much to his neighbours consternation, he filmed the staged bout, as well as many other films, in his backyard. To benefit from the war fever whipped up by the ‘yellow press’ during the Spanish-American War he needed to find a larger stage in which to stage his re-enactments of the battles; with typical audacity, he selected Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park for his arena.

Around this time, Thomas Edison, who considered himself the inventor of the motion picture and therefore believed he owned the sole right to exploit it, started pursuing Lubin and others for patent infringement. Lubin indignantly informed his lawyer, “I want nothing to do with that man.” “Well, Mr Lubin,” his lawyer famously replied, “He wants something to do with you!”

In 1899, the complaints of his neighbours grew so vociferous that Lubin moved his studio to the roof of 912 Arch Street in the city's red-light district, correctly assuming its residents were less likely to complain about the sometimes off-colour scenes he shot. In 1899, he also became the first American manufacturer to market his product in Germany.

Battles with Edison

Lubin’s legal battle with Edison rumbled on for nine years. Despite his claims against Lubin, Edison wasn’t above a few infringements of his own, entering into an agreement with Vitagraph in which they bought Lubin’s films on Edison’s behalf so that he could dupe them. The future looked grim for Lubin when Edison won a legal action against the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company which appeared to give him full control of the motion picture industry. Instructed by his legal team to leave the business or face serious repercussions, Lubin moved his entire operation to Germany, beyond even Edison’s reach, as the Wizard of Menlo Park had neglected to apply for patents beyond the United States’ shores. Lubin’s self-imposed exile was short-lived: the moment the court overturned Edison’s victory on appeal, he returned to America and resumed his activities.

Soon after his return, Lubin established the first of what would become a chain of movie theatres at 926 Market Street, possibly as something to fall back on should Edison relentless legal action meet with more permanent success. In 1903, he also established the Philadelphia Film Exchange, offering to rent “one million feet of film on 1,000-foot reels, changed weekly.” By 1905, it would be one of the largest exchanges in the country, with offices in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Norfolk.

Lubin’s business expanded rapidly over the next two years despite renewed legal action by Edison. He began making narrative films, often scene-for-scene remakes of popular films like The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Personal (1904) and scored a coup in 1906 by being the first producer to bring footage of the devastating San Francisco earthquake to East Coast screens (he would later include some of the footage in his 1913 three-reel drama When the Earth Trembled). However, in 1907, Edison’s continual legal challenges finally paid off when he won a decision against Biograph that was sure to pave the way for a similar lawsuit against Lubin. Realising he was defeated at last, Lubin accepted Edison’s recommendation that he take out a license to use his patented projector to spare them both the cost of a legal case.

Also in 1907, Lubin rented the entire five-storey building at 926 Market Street that was home to his theatre. He converted the floor above the theatre into a studio and the top floors into processing labs and offices. Once installed, he announced the release of “A New Film Every Week.” While he awaited Edison’s terms for becoming a licensee, he renovated and expanded existing theatres and opened new ones in Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Reading.