The wide-gauge Biograph originated with ambitious plans to provide alternatives to Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope movie viewer, a device which had introduced 35mm celluloid film. Operating as the KMCD combination from the summer of 1894 (named after the company’s founders) and as the American Mutoscope Company from December 1894, Herman Casler, W.K.L. Dickson, Elias Koopman and Harry Marvin originally envisaged several lightweight novelty devices employing flicked paper photographs to provide the illusion of movement. The highly successful Mutoscope viewer was eventually introduced, but not until the company had already made rapid advances in the field of projected films. Dickson had previously played a major part in developing Edison’s Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewer, making it probable that the unusual technical features of Biograph’s equipment originated in an attempt to avoid patent infringement claims.

Unable to use Edison films to supply images for their viewing devices, the group were compelled to design their own camera. Planning started in November or December 1894, with a prototype machine completed by March 1895. Like the Kinetograph, the Mutograph camera was operated by electricity, but, unlike the earlier device, it employed far larger film. The individual photographs employed in the Mutoscope viewer were printed on bromide paper from wide-gauge negatives, making them better defined than the tiny images of Kinetoscope. By June 1895, the American Mutoscope Company’s first subject, a sparring match between Casler and Marvin, had been filmed outside a workshop at Syracuse, New York.

The initial decision to produce a projector was perhaps influenced by Dickson’s experience with the Latham family, with whom he worked covertly during 1894 and 1895. Although the results achieved by their Eidoloscope were sometimes flawed, a series of exhibitions across the US in the second half of 1895 demonstrated the market potential for projected films. But despite experiments with projection as early as November 1895, and an extensive filming campaign undertaken by Dickson (assisted by “Billy” Bitzer) from April 1896, the Biograph projector was not publicly exhibited until September 1896 – several months after the first showing of Edison’s Vitagraph, the Lumière Cinématographe and Birt Acres’ Kineopticon. But with a larger, clearer image and a comparative lack of “flicker” as a result of its faster projection rate, Biograph soon became established as the market leader in the United States.

From an early stage, the American Mutoscope Company was an ambitious, large-scale organisation with extensive financial backing from a consortium of bankers and industrialists. An open-air studio on the roof of the company’s New York City HQ at 841 Broadway, New York City, turned out short fiction films on a weekly basis from early 1897, while Biograph cameramen roamed the country securing views of sporting occasions, national events and – a Biograph trademark – travelling shots from trains and boats. In November 1899, the company conducted a major experiment with artificial lighting, filming the whole of the championship boxing contest between Jim Jeffries and Jack Sharkey under a massive installation of electric arc lamps in an indoor arena at Coney Island, New York City. When a court decision rejected all Edison’s patent claims in March 1902, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company began the switch to 35mm production, filming many subjects in an electrically lit indoor studio at East Fourteenth Street, New York (opened 1903). Between 1895–1903 the company had made more than 2,000 wide-gauge films. After shedding the restrictions of the wide-gauge format, Biograph became one of the world’s main producers of fiction films, with its lead director D. W. Griffith establishing many key elements of a rapidly evolving narrative genre.

Biograph became an international brand when an offshoot of the company was set up in England in 1897. Within months the British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate (British Mutoscope and Biograph Company from 1899) became established as the largest and most prestigious British film concern. The company was expansionist in both operation and organization. Its chief filmmaker, W. K. L. Dickson (often assisted by Emile Lauste), filmed events in many countries; took “animated portraits” of European politicians, royalty, and religious leaders; and secured an outstanding record of the Anglo–Boer War in South Africa in 1899-1900. British Mutoscope and Biograph also promoted a worldwide network of companies who co-operated closely during the late 1890s and early 1900s. Like their American counterpart, the company introduced artificial lighting at an early stage, filming a battle scene from Shakespeare’s Henry V inside the Lyceum Theatre, London, in January 1901 and, more significantly, opening an innovative indoor studio at 107 Regent Street, London, from 1900. Having made around 1,300 wide-gauge films, the British company moved to 35mm production in 1903. Although remaining a leading film company for some years, the British concern did not replicate the success of American Biograph and it ceased to function before World War I. The Biograph and Mutoscope company for France had a brief, but productive existence, issuing around 400 wide-gauge subjects, while it was outlived by the Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph Gesellschaft which had produced 300 wide-gauge films by 1902.