William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (3 August 1860 – 28 September 1935) was a British-American inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison.

James Dickson claimed direct lineage from the painter William Hogarth, and from Judge John Waite, the man who sentenced King Charles I to death.

In October, Edison filed a preliminary claim, known as a caveat, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; outlining his plans for the device, subsequently named the Kinetoscope.

In late 1889, inspired by a recent encounter with Étienne-Jules Marey, Edison came up with a fourth caveat and ordered the team to change direction to work with rolls of film.

William Dickson and his team created the illusion of movement by continuously moving the strip of perforated film, bearing sequential images, whilst illuminating it by brief flashes of light through the slit in a rotating shutter.

They also devised the Kinetograph, a motion picture camera to photograph films for in-house experiments and eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations, at speeds of up to 46 frames per second.

[10] These former Edison associates helped to design the Eidoloscope projector system and a widescreen camera to film with, which would be used in the first commercial movie screening in world history on 20 May 1895.

The Mutoscope machines produced moving images by means of a revolving drum of photographs/frames, similar in concept to flip-books, taken from an actual piece of film.

[14] This omission was corrected by the exhaustive research of Gordon Hendricks[15][16] and Paul Spehr[17] who revealed the full extent of his contributions to many moving picture projects.