Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An instrument for the exhibition of a series of photographs in rapid succession to give the optical effect known as a moving picture.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A simple form of moving-picture machine in which the series of views, exhibiting the successive phases of a scene, are printed on paper and mounted around the periphery of a wheel. The rotation of the wheel brings them rapidly into sight, one after another, and the blended effect gives a semblance of motion.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A motion-picture device of the late nineteenth century, to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Originally a trademark.

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Examples

  • There isn't one laptop in the show, however; every film, video, DVD, or what-show-you is seen in a dedicated viewing context, whether cast upon a large screen, seen on a small screen in a booth, or even peeked at through an updated version of a side-show mutoscope.

    Peter Frank: Blague d'Art: Moving Pictures, Frozen Music Peter Frank 2010

  • There isn't one laptop in the show, however; every film, video, DVD, or what-show-you is seen in a dedicated viewing context, whether cast upon a large screen, seen on a small screen in a booth, or even peeked at through an updated version of a side-show mutoscope.

    Peter Frank: Blague d'Art: Moving Pictures, Frozen Music Peter Frank 2010

  • Michael found a mutoscope and began cranking it, leaning gingerly to look in the goggle-type viewer and watch the flip-card film, SEE NAUGHTY MARIETTA SUN BATHING, the sign on the brass-trimmed machine read, PASSED BY NY CENSORS, OCT.

    THE FORBIDDEN GAME L.J. SMITH 2010

  • Michael found a mutoscope and began cranking it, leaning gingerly to look in the goggle-type viewer and watch the flip-card film, SEE NAUGHTY MARIETTA SUN BATHING, the sign on the brass-trimmed machine read, PASSED BY NY CENSORS, OCT.

    THE FORBIDDEN GAME L.J. SMITH 2010

  • Of other moving pictures machines we have had the vitascope, vitagraph, magniscope, mutoscope, panoramagraph, theatograph and scores of others all derived from the two Greek roots _grapho_ I write and _scopeo_ I view.

    Marvels of Modern Science Paul Severing

  • Herman Caster the biograph and mutoscope, or the Lumiere brothers in

    Stories of Inventors The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers Russell Doubleday 1910

  • The mutoscope widens the use of motion-photography infinitely.

    Stories of Inventors The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers Russell Doubleday 1910

  • In fact, a sort of circulating library already exists, films or mutoscope pictures being rented for a reasonable sum; and thus many of the most important of the world's happenings may be seen as they actually occurred.

    Stories of Inventors The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers Russell Doubleday 1910

  • A book made up of these; pictures in their order is such a solid, and the little pocket mutoscope exactly satisfies this description.

    The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained 1910

  • The kinetoscope with its two-dimensional strip and its shutter does the same thing more steadily, and presents the illusion of motion in a two-dimensional area even better than the little hand mutoscope.

    The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained 1910

Comments

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  • A peep-show-type device in which a sequence of photographs is arranged on a drum that rotates when the viewer turns a handle. Developed by the K.M.C.D. Syndicate, later called the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, founded in 1895 and still in existence.

    March 7, 2007