By Boxing Bob Newman

Argentine boxing historian, author, radio and TV broadcaster Marcos Vistali, contacted this writer earlier this week with what he feels is a significant historical find in the world of boxing. Read on to learn about this discovery, in Vistali’s own words…

We all know, by now, that the first fight to be filmed was that of James Corbett with Peter Courtney on October 7, 1894. It was not that film that drew attention to boxing. Before the brothers Auguste and Louis Loumière introduced it, as early as 1888 an English photographer Eadweard Muybridge took serial images of boxers, which were then intended to be passed in sequence to give the sensation of movement.

It was in June 1891 that Edison patented his new inventions, the kinetograph, a camera that allowed a series of images to be photographed at equal intervals, and the kinetoscope, a drawer in which the sequence taken could be seen through a peephole with a magnifying lens. with the first apparatus, which created the illusion of movement. This new invention captivated fans of boxing and other films (Workers leaving the factory. The arrival of the train), who paid pennies to see a few scenes as they had never imagined.

Edison had a fixation on bringing boxing to celluloid and as early as 1891 he auditioned two unknown men. Before Corbett-Courtney he performed in 1894 “The Boxing Cats” and “The wrestling dog” both of dogs and cats fighting. Driven by the amount of kinetoscopes that were commissioned and sold, given the appeal they had generated in the public who filled them with coins in order to appreciate the already seen and the new, he set up a study in a barracks called Black María.

Edison sought to perfect both teams with the intention of shooting a boxing match, but failed to perfect it and the storage capacity was not enough for a round.

A New York chain drugstore owner, Otway Latham, invested $ 1,000 and bought 10 sets from Edison. He began to study its limitations and found that it took about 45 meters of film and slowing the passage of frames to 30 per second. With this innovation, Latham, together with Edison Manufacturing, set out to film the first boxing match in the history of cinema.

A popular boxer named Machael Leonard was hired for $ 150 and his rival Jack Cushing for $ 50. It took a week for a clear day to show up and they went to Black Maria on Friday, June 15, 1894 to fight six rounds.

Each round lasted one minute. The kinetographer could not roll more than that time. Between each of the six rounds, at the seven-minute break, the men reloaded the equipment and shot a new round.

The Leonard-Cushing film premiered at the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company in August, (Corbett-Courtney was in October) on ten different machines at a cost of 10 cents per machine, making the six rounds cost 60 cents. The film was lost, the result was never known, but no one can deny that boxing in the cinema was already a reality.