Lincoln & Parker Film Company (Bought Thomas A. Edison's Motion Picture Studio )- Massachusetts 1918

Beautiful certificate from the Lincoln & Parker Film Company issued in 1918. This historic document was printed by Goes and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's name. This item has the signatures of the Company's President, F. H. Lincoln and Treasurer, J. H. Parker and is over 88 years old.


Certificate Vignette

In 1912 onwards Thomas Edison's motion picture company was in sharp decline. It could not stay on the cutting edge of film production, and did not keep pace with competitors' innovations in film narration, partly because film production was not the main focus of Edison's industrial empire. An antimonopoly ruling delivered against the Trust in October 1915 was another blow to Edison's film business.

Edison continued to introduce new products in an effort to improve the situation. The Kinetophone, which was designed to merge the motion picture camera with the phonograph, was introduced in 1913. While this Kinetophone was an improvement on the earlier model, it ultimately proved unsuccessful due to the difficulty of achieving synchronization and to the lackluster reception of the film subjects by viewers. Falling sales for motion picture projectors by 1915 led to the end of the manufacture of Edison motion picture equipment, in spite of the introduction of a Super-Kinetoscope.

By 1915, Edison began using outside distributors for features, including Paramount and George Kleine, but the coming of World War I meant the loss of European markets. Efforts to diminish expenditures at the Edison Company were unsuccessful. Attempts to provide more wholesome films through a series known as the "Conquest Pictures" (Gold and Diamond Mines of South Africa) failed to rescue the company's flagging financial situation. On March 30, 1918, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., sold the studio and plant to the Lincoln & Parker Film Company, thus ending Thomas Edison's involvement in film production.