Featured on TV
As our Mutoscope is made using the authentic picture card method employed by the original Mutoscope type machines, we were delighted that it was featured in a recent BBC television history series, "What the Victorians Did For Us", presented by Adam Hart-Davis.
The series looks at many things invented by the Victorians which have influenced our modern lives, including early photography and cinema.
Below is an informative transcript of Adam Hart-Davis talking about the Mutoscope, from the episode entitled, "Pleasure Seekers".
The Mutoscope
Adam Hart-Davis: Moving pictures were made possible by the invention of celluloid. Once they had this stuff, then they could actually take a whole sequence of still pictures, and then look at them one after the other, and then give the idea of movement.
The trouble though was how were they going to show them, because nobody had yet invented the projector.
To begin with a whole lot of weird and wonderful devices were invented, and this was one of them, the Mutoscope.
And you just have to put a penny in the slot, look through, and turn the handle.
Known as "What The Butler Saw" machines, Mutoscopes became popular at fun fairs in the early 1890s.
Oh! Lucky butler!
I'm going to make my own film, a tribute to a star of the Mutoscope boom, "Sandow, the Strong Man".
Filming is easy. The Victorians had invented movie cameras, but oddly enough, they hadn't invented projectors, and it's the way the film is played back, that gives the Mutoscope it's distinctive style.
We've shot our movie, and we've printed out 212 individual frames. All we need to do, is chop them all out like this.
And then, peel off the sticky back, stick them down on to this card, that then goes into the box here, and when we've got them all ready, we can stick them round one of these wheels like that.
And then I can show you how it works.
This is the inside of the Mutoscope. I turn the handle and all these cards just flick, it's like a flick-book. Watch!
Mutoscopes were popular at fair grounds, but they were never going to have mass appeal. Watching the Mutoscope films, was a strictly solo affair.
So when the Lumier Brothers in France began projecting films onto huge screens in 1895, the Mutoscope fad was over.
And the golden age of cinema was born.
Transcript material from "What the Victorians Did For Us" is (c) British Broadcasting Corporation, 2001
