<p>This is a selection of mutoscope title cards and apparatus. <br></p> <p>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 title cards (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.</p> <p>Keywords: Mutoscope, early motion picture, moving picture, movie </p> <p>Written by Ryan Lintelman for a finding aid for the Photographic History Collection:</p> <p> 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. </p> <p>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 book on a metal core, and avoided Edison’s patents with this slightly different style of exhibition. </p> <p>The company’s headquarters in New York City featured a rooftop studio on a turntable to ensure favorable illumination, and the short subjects made here found such success that by 1897, the Edison company’s dominance of the industry was in danger. American Mutoscope became American Mutoscope & Biograph in 1899, when the namesake projector, invented by Casler, became the most used in the industry.</p> <p>Mutoscope viewers were found in many amusement areas and arcades until at least the 1960s. Their inexpensiveness and short, often comical or sensational subjects allowed the machines a far longer life than the competing Edison Kinetoscope. The company also found success in its production and projection of motion pictures, though its activity was mired by patent litigation involving Thomas Edison through the 1910s. </p> <p>The notable director D. W. Griffith was first hired as an actor, working with pioneering cinematographer G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, before moving behind the camera at Biograph, and making 450 films for the company. Griffith and Bitzer invented cinematographic techniques like the fade-out and iris shot, made the first film in Hollywood, and launched the careers of early stars Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. The company, simply renamed the Biograph Company in 1909, went out of business in 1928, after losing Griffith and facing a changing movie industry.  </p> <p>The Museum’s collection was acquired in the years between 1926 and the mid-1970s. The original mutograph camera and two later models of the camera were given to the Smithsonian in 1926 by the International Mutoscope Reel Company, which inherited Biograph’s mutoscope works and continued making the viewers and reels through the 1940s. </p> <p>The viewers, reels, and posters in the collection were acquired for exhibition in the National Museum of American History, and were later accessioned as objects in the Photographic History Collection. Many of the mutoscope reels in the collection date to the period from 1896-1905, and show early motion picture subjects, some of which were thought to be lost films before their examination in 2008.</p> <p><br></p>

<p>This is a selection of Leica cameras from Photographic History Collection (PHC) at the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The PHC holds  has a significant collection of Leica cameras, lenses, and accessories totaling more than 200 items including over 25 cameras from the 1920s to the 2000s. This Learning Lab collection includes a pdf finding aid for Leica cameras.  Included in the PHC are cameras used by photojournalists Carl Mydans and J. Ross Baughman.<br></p> <p>For additional collections, search collections.si.edu.</p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">Keywords: Leica, Barnack, 35mm, photography, camera<br></span></p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">From the finding aid written by Anthony Brooks:<br>Leica Cameras have a unique position in the history of 35mm film photography. The Leica was not the first still camera taking 35mm film. It was not even the first commercially successful 35mm camera, but it set the gold standard for all other 35mm cameras and turned 35mm cameras from toys into serious professional tools.</span></p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">The 35mm film gauge was first introduced in 1892 by Kodak for use by Thomas Edison to make movie films. Edison quickly settled on a standard frame size (18 x 24mm) with four sprocket holes per frame. This movie standard has remained unchanged. The growth of the movie industry in the early twentieth century required large quantities of 35mm film. 1000 feet of 35mm movie film creates less than 20 minutes of movie images. Soon there was interest in using this film for still photography and after 1910, the first 35mm cameras appeared. Most of the early 35mm camera designs used the single frame 18x24mm format and many used lengths of film capable of taking a hundred or more exposures. The quality of photographs from this small format was often disappointing and the number of exposures was a deterrent to amateur photographers. A contemporary small Kodak vest pocket camera took larger negatives on an eight exposure roll and produced better quality prints. </span>The majority of early 35mm cameras were not commercially successful and are rare today. One exception was the American made Ansco Memo introduced in 1926 that for a few years had a dedicated following. However, the introduction of the Leica 35mm camera was to dramatically change the status of 35mm photography. </p> <p><span class="fontstyle0">The Leica was designed by Oscar Barnack, an employee of the Leitz Optical Company based in Wetzlar, Germany. Barnack may have conceived the first Leica for test exposures in the 18x24mm single frame format. Test exposures were often taken to check the lighting set-up for movies and portraits. However, at some point Barnack decided to design a 35mm camera for photography in its own right. In order to improve<br>image quality Barnack used two single frames and thus the standard 35mm film frame was born. The PHC contains many significant items that represent the history of Leica cameras.</span> </p> <p></p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p> <p></p>

<p>#nmahphc</p> <p>This is a small sampling of view cameras from the Photographic History Collection. </p> <p>For additional cameras, search collections.si.edu</p> <p><br></p>