Edwin S. Porter (1870-1941) was a prominent innovator in the early years of cinema. He worked collaboratively, producing, directing, and editing a variety of films, including the first blockbuster motion picture, The Great Train Robbery in 1903.

Edwin Stratton Porter grew up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, a small manufacturing town famous for its production of coke, a type of processed coal used for making steel. Porter was the fourth of eight children. His father, Thomas, managed Porter and Brother (later Thomas Porter and Co.), an enterprise that began as an undertaking business and later expanded to sell factory-made furniture. As the Connellsville coke industry expanded, the family business flourished and Porter grew up in a relatively secure, middle-class home. The coke industry, however, depended on large numbers of unskilled workers who worked long hours. As a child and a young man, Porter witnessed the tension between laborers and industrialists sometimes...