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Story: Arcade, computer and video games

Nineteenth-century mutoscope

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Nineteenth-century mutoscope

Mutoscopes were early motion-picture machines. They did not project images onto a screen. Rather, the viewer looked into the machine through a lens and drove the film reel by turning a hand-crank on the front or side of the mutoscope. In the early 1900s there were coin-operated mutoscope parlours in New Zealand. In 2012 this fully operational 19th-century mutoscope was in the Time Cinema in Wellington.

Courtesy of Time Cinema

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Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

by Kerryn Pollock

Courtesy of Time Cinema

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How to cite this page

Kerryn Pollock, Arcade, computer and video games – Arcade games: 19th century to 1960s, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/39297/nineteenth-century-mutoscope (accessed 3 June 2026).

Story by Kerryn Pollock, published 3 December 2012.