what was the first motion picture viewed by the public?
Blacksmith Scene.
Kinetoscope
 The first film publicly shown on the system was "Blacksmith Scene"
what is kinetoscope? An early motion picture exhibition device. who invented it? William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. how does it work? It creates an illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.
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Kinetoscope [SEP] Going public
The premiere of the completed Kinetoscope was held not at the Chicago World's Fair, as originally scheduled, but at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. The first film publicly shown on the system was "Blacksmith Scene" (aka "Blacksmiths"); directed by Dickson and shot by Heise, it was produced at the new Edison moviemaking studio, known as the Black Maria. Despite extensive promotion, a major display of the Kinetoscope, involving as many as twenty-five machines, never took place at the Chicago exposition. Kinetoscope production had been delayed in part because of Dickson's absence of more than eleven weeks early in the year with a nervous breakdown.