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One of Breer's mutoscopes.
Breer:
When I was back here in America in 1957, I was thinking about buying a mutoscope. Somebody told me to look up this guy on Tenth Avenue who had a big collection of them, along with pinball machines and other penny arcade stuff. I went to see him and got a price on a mutoscope. I think it was twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. I had to go home and think about it. When I called him up, he told me that while I'd hesitated, Disney people had bought almost all of them for Disneyland. The price of the few he had left had gone up to seventy-five dollars. I said the hell with it, and decided to make my own.
Shortly after I went back to France, I started making mutoscopes. The first was made out of a cigar box: paper was glued in a cross section of a broomstick with slots in itprobably a hundred images in all. It was restored by Pontus Hulten a while ago: it's become a museum relic. Anyhow, I made a bunch. They were big contraptions, sculpted on the edges so that just sitting there they were interesting as shapes. When you cranked them, the shapes would make for a kind of flowing change. I still have one. The rest fell apart.