Since Thomas Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope in 1891, it became the most prevalent motion picture device in the United States in the succeeding years. However, viewers could only watch the films one at a time in a peep-show box, not projected for an audience. Brothers Grey and Otway Latham, who founded a company that filmed and exhibited footages of boxing matches through their Kinetoscope parlor, saw this as a problem. “We were unable to accommodate the crowds we had, as only one at a time could view the pictures exhibited by the Kinetoscope,” the brothers recalled, as related by Charles Musser in The Emergence of Cinema.