[4] After attending public schools in Connellsville, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator.

[7] Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States.

He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope.

Returning to New York City in early 1898, Porter found work at the Eden Musée, a Manhattan wax museum and amusement hall[8] which had become a center for motion picture exhibition and production and licensee of the Edison Manufacturing Company.

As an exhibitor, Porter had tremendous creative control over these programs, presenting a slate of films accompanied by a selection of music and live narration.

[10] Soon afterward he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print.

From his experience as a touring projectionist, Porter knew what pleased crowds, and he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison.

In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902) and Life of an American Fireman (1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, was the first American film to use intertitles which helped the audience follow the story by identifying the scenes and some of the principal characters.

Porter's next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903) took the archetypal American Western story, already familiar to audiences from dime novels and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience.

The one-reel film, with a running time of twelve minutes, was assembled in twenty separate shots, along with a startling close-up of a bandit firing at the camera.

In 1909 after tiring of the industrial system set up to feed the booming nickelodeon business, Porter left Edison and founded a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors.