[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrtstSunk6E?rel=0]
In addition to patenting many inventions made by other people and coming up with some nice quotes about perseverance, Thomas Edison was a cinematic pioneer. Many of his inventions and innovations paved the way for motion pictures to exist, and he even started one of the first movie studios, Edison Motion Pictures .
Edison Motion Pictures produced hundreds of short movies. Some of them record subjects that modern audiences would consider mundane, like a woman bathing her child . But to audiences unused to movie technology, even the dullest image turned extraordinary when they were blown up on a movie screen.
One of Edison Motion Picture’s films is called Love in a Hammock , which is perhaps the first time a hammock was filmed by a video camera. Made in either 1900 or 1901, the movie’s rudimentary plot involves a man trying to mack it up with a woman who’s sitting in a hammock. (This antiquated behavior obviously never happens today.) Unbeknownst to them, two young rapscallions — obviously with impure intentions — climb up one of the trees that the hammock is slung to.
The official description of the film continues thus: “When the love making reaches a climax the branch on which the boy is lying breaks.” (Sic: The “love making” of the movie’s description is a far cry from the word’s modern connotations. This movie is thoroughly SFW, with nothing more than some less-than-saucy making out. This is 1900, after all.)
“The ending is exceedingly ludicrous, and we predict that this subject will be highly amusing.”
