The 5¢ Theatre Ticket

This Day in History: June 19, 1905

Circa 1910
A nickelodeon theater in Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
Nickelodeons often used gaudy posters and
ornamented facades to attract patrons,
but bare walls and hard seats usually awaited within.

The first projected motion pictures date mid-to-late 1800s with the Berlin Wintergarten theatre being the site of the first movie theater ever (1895). The earliest documented account of projected motion pictures in the United States was in June 1894 in Richmond, Indiana by Charles Francis Jenkins. Movie cameras had been on the scene since the late 1880s marked by inventors in both Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison.

Today's focus is on the Nickelodeon, named after the U.S. five-cent coin, and the ancient Greek word odeion, a roofed-over theater. Earlier, "Peep show" machines (Kinetoscopes) had been the motion picture devices.

On June 19, 1905, some 450 people attend the opening day of the world’s first nickelodeon, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and developed by the showman Harry Davis...

The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged each patron five cents. Nickelodeons (named for a combination of the admission cost and the Greek word for “theater”) soon spread across the country. Their usual offerings included live vaudeville acts as well as short films. By 1907, some 2 million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, and the storefront theaters remained the main outlet for films until they were replaced around 1910 by large modern theaters. Click HERE...

The Senses of Cinema brought forth a new form of entertainment still very much alive today but nowhere resemble the humble beginnings.

Senses of Cinema

19th century

Ah-h-h! Where would we be without the movies—

a favorite pastime of enjoyment and relaxation?

Its presentation may have changed as technology has advanced,

but the emotions on and off the screen still remain the same.

Movies, the cinema, the silver screen

Exposed on film metaphysical tricks

Motion pictures and moving photoplays

Rendered reeling picture shows known as flicks

Viewers, no matter the era or their age

Befell gripping sights, sounds, even smells

What better means to idle away the time

Than captured under a magic spell

From slides in the magic-latern show

To successive motion in flip books

Quests out of touch with reality

Dangled from supernatural hooks

From the beginning of cinema

To the first appearance of sound

Optical toys and shadowbox shows

Played magical tricks all around

Quickly becoming popular in carnivals

The "peep show" made a dramatic stand

As the forerunner of motion picture films

The Kinetoscope primed movie land

Edison Kinetoscope Record of a Sneeze

©2013 Awakenings
Sharla Lee Shults

Classic Movie Kisses


Don't Forget. . .