Edison’s Kinetoscope
Thomas Edison may have lost the bid to power the World’s Fair, but he still made an impact on world culture at the Fair. He debut the kinetoscope, a predecessor of modern movie projectors. The kinetoscope worked like a high-level ‘flip book.’ A person would lean over a box to view a series of photographs that change ever so slightly to give the appearance of motion. The novelty of seeing motion inside a box, and being able to repeatedly see a moment captured in time, caught on quickly. Kinetoscope parlors popped up in cities all over the world. The craze quickly died as film projection technology caught on, since kinetoscope “movies” were short and could only be viewed by one person at a time, but it showed the potential of recording motion and playing to an audience.