Description

Posterboard with painted advertisement for the mutoscope motion picture "Unloading the Mail 1903" and an attached photograph of a mail cart on a street in Washington, D.C. This mutoscope movie was one of a series produced collaboratively by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company and the United States Post Office Department to illustrate the delivery of the nation's mail. It was displayed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis World's Fair.The Mutoscope Collection in the National Museum of American History’s Photographic History Collection is among the most significant of its kind in any museum. Composed of 3 cameras, 13 viewers, 59 movie reels and 53 movie posters, the collection documents the early years of the most successful and influential motion picture company of the industry’s formative period. It also showcases a unique style of movie exhibition that outlasted its early competitors, existing well into the 20th century.The American Mutoscope Company was founded in 1895 by a group of four men, Elias Koopman, Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to manufacture a motion picture viewer called the mutoscope and to produce films for exhibition. Dickson had recently left the employ of Thomas Edison, for whom he had solved the problem of “doing for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” by inventing the modern motion picture. Casler and Dickson worked together to perfect the mutoscope, which exhibited films transferred to a series of cards mounted in the style of a flip...

Record Contributed By

National Museum of American History

Record Harvested From

Smithsonian Institution