Page 193 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 193/206
Herman Casler + William Kennedy Laurie Dixon + Elias Bernard Koopman:The Mutoscope 1898
Before the movie-business became standardised on 35mm film and 24 frames/sec, there were dozens of experimental approaches. Some, like Edison’s Kinetoscope and Cassler & Co’s Mutoscope, were based on the arcade-machine model - as you can see with the Mutoscope - it was an industrialised flip- book. Louis Le Prince’s paper-based, 16-lens system, Max Skladanowsky’s Bioskop, and many more hopeful inventors and their inventions competed with each other for a slice of what was obviously going to be a new mass market. The Mutoscope was cheaper for exhibitors to purchase, was coin- operated, and came to dominate the nickelodeon market - there were ancient Mutoscopes in the amusement arcade at seaside resorts until the 1960s, when we adopted decimal currency and the old one-penny piece was withdrawn (1971). Each Mutoscope contained a flip-book mechanism containing about 850 7cm x 4.75cm cards, the mechanism was turned by hand - as you can see above left, a popular ‘reel’ was What the Butler Saw - a titillating peep-show of Edwardian ladies undressing, couched in the old language of class. Eventually, as we know, arcades became totally digital and the platform for video-games.
In the 1960s there was still a working Mutoscope in the amusement arcade at the end of my local pier - at Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight. These leftover Victorian machines - along with The Laughing Policeman and other rather creepy automatons, and a huge variety of penny-slot machines, pinball tables, and miraculously a Juke Box too. I heard Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and even Nico Fidenco’s A Little Grain of Sand ‘live’ on the juke box on a summers evening when you’re 15 years old... bliss!