Awakenings: The 5¢ Theatre Ticket

This Day in History: June 19, 1905

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_%28movie_theater%29

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...