Edison was commonly referred to as “The Wizard of Menlo Park”, and his Vitascope presentation had come to Providence when Lovecraft was six years old. It played to virtually the entire town for a month, twelve hours a day. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: the American screen to 1907. University of California Press, 1994. p.125.

I would imagine the shows were fronted with a film of Edison himself. One thus wonders if the childhood memory of the huge Edison on the screen might have been a spur to the dream that inspired “Nyarlathotep”?