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David Brewster: Kaleidoscope 1816.
So popular was this - the first interactive, all-colour, portable optical toy, that although patented in 1816, by 1818 it was being widely copied and manufactured throughout the UK. Through some incomplete patent-filing, thousands of kaleidoscopes from different manufacturers were on sale, and so popular was the device that it occasioned a ‘kaleidoscomania’ that lasted for the next several decades. Brewster complains in a letter to his wife (1818): “I called yesterday at Sir Joseph Banks’, and met Sir Everard Home, and other wise men there. Both of these gentlemen assured me that had I managed my patent rightly, I would have made one hundred thousand pounds by it! This is the universal opinion, and therefore the mortification is very great. You can form no conception of the effect which the instrument excited in London; all that you have heard falls infinitely short of the reality. No book and no instrument in the memory of man ever produced such a singular effect. They are exhibited publicly on the streets for a penny, and I had the pleasure of paying this sum yesterday; these are about two feet long and a foot wide. Infants are seen carrying them in their hands, the coachmen on their boxes are busy using them, and thousands of poor people make their bread by making and selling them.” (https://brewstersociety.com/kaleidoscope-university/kaleidoscopic-image/). Brewster’s invention, with its possibility of endless visual novelty, became a must-have gadget - the first and possibly most successful in a line of products exploiting optical phenomena that were to presage the invention of the Mutoscope, the movies, and eventually television, smartphones and VR headsets in the 21st century.
Brewster was an early example of a polymathic researcher/engineer/entrepreneur. And like his contemporaries, Humphrey Davey, Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre, John Herschel, and Thomas Wedgwood, Brewster was a product of the wonderful intellectual 'gene pool' of this period of the post- Napoleonic Industrial Revolution. This cultural ferment was visible in the wholly interdisciplinary mix of the Salon - where guests might be artists, writers, scientists, engineers, dandies, wits, industrialists - whoever might contribute to the lively discourse. A hundred and fifty years later CP Snow would bemoan the 'Two Cultures' (of science and the humanities) that appeared to be permanently separated: