Tags animaloscope, animatoscope, chronophotographoscope, cinnomonograph, cinograph, corminograph, craboscope, criterioscope, film, history of technology, katoptiikum, lobsterscope, motion pictures, movies, mutoscope, phenakistoscope, variscope, venetrope, vitaletiscope, vitropticon, vivrescope, xograph
Think it’s hard keeping track of all the names for new technologies, protocols, and emergent media in the early twenty-first century? Then you have something in common with turn-of-the-last-century viewers trying to figure out what to call the various newfangled media of moving pictures. Here’s a piece from the “Times Topics” section of the January, 28, 1898 edition of the New York Times enumerating the many names for the newfangled medium, the motion picture:
It’s a vibrant lexical bestiary of images, actions, and ideals: time, light, vitality, movement, judgment, change, vision, epiphany, and the animal world. Although the writer of this piece talks about a single machine, these weren’t all names for the same thing; moving pictures emerged in a radiant bouquet of formats, modes of presentation, and proprietary media. The names are evocative of another time—and taken together, they express a condition familiar to us all.
