The Latham Loop is used in film projection and image capture. It isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods.

Invention of the Latham loop is usually credited to film pioneers William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Eugene Lauste. Both men worked with Woodville Latham

Woodville Latham

Major Woodville Latham was an ordnance officer of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and professor of chemistry at West Virginia University. He was significant in the development of early film technology....

, developing a motion picture camera and projector in 1895. Dickson later acknowledged Lauste as inventor of the loop, though rival claims were made in support of another Latham associate, engineer Enoch J. Rector

Enoch J. Rector

Enoch J. Rector was an American boxing film promoter and early cinema technician. He was a partner in Woodville Latham's Kinetoscope Exhibition Company during the mid-1890s, working with Latham and his sons Otway and Grey, as well as fellow cinema technicians William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and...

, who used the technology to shoot the hour and a half-long documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight

The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight

The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight is an 1897 documentary film directed by Enoch J. Rector depicting a boxing match between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada on St. Patrick's Day the same year. Originally running at over 100 minutes, it was the longest film that had ever been...

, in 1897.

Woodville Latham applied for a patent on June 1, 1896. In his patent application, Latham wrote,

In order that these parts [of the film projector] may operate as described, it is essential that the loop of slack film be maintained at all times ready for the intermittingly-acting device and also that the slack-manipulating and the intermittingly-moving devices be positively driven by mechanism which will absolutely insure the presence of the slack and the accurate movement of the film. The reason these parts and their arrangement and method of operation are such important and valuable features of the invention is because their action is necessarily exceedingly rapid, and if the intermittingly-feeding mechanism were heavy, so as to have much inertia, or if any considerable portion of the film or either of the reels which support it were stopped and started at each transition from picture to picture there would be such strain brought to bear on the sprocket-holes in the film as would speedily tear it adjacent to such holes, thus ruining it…

By 1905, virtually all motion picture projectors used the Latham Loop. The patent expired in 1913.

When Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...

 excluded his competitor Biograph

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company

The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1928. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to film production and exhibition, and for two decades was one of the most prolific, releasing over three thousand short...

from licensing Edison's key motion picture patents in 1907, Biograph retaliated by purchasing the patent for the Latham Loop. In a patent infringement suit by Edison against Biograph, a federal court upheld the validity of the Latham patent.

External links

• U.S. Patent for Projecting-Kinetoscope, filed 1896, patented 1902.
• The "Latham Loop": A Loop of Film that Freed an Industry.