“Panoramas are among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense in this age of contrivances. What cost a couple of hundred pounds and half a year half a century ago, now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour.”
In some larger cities, round buildings were constructed to house panoramas, but in most of our rural communities, traveling panorama shows came to the local opera houses.
In the early 1870s, the Kaiser Panorama was invented by August Furhrmann, in the German empire. The large circular apparatus had 25 seats and stereoscopes arranged around the outside.
Note - after the first world war, there was no longer an emperor. The Kaiser Panorama was then renamed the World Panorama.
Moving Panoramas, also known as "Crankies" became popular by 1900. An early version of a travel film, they involved a large and very long strip of painted fabric being wound between two vertical cylinders and then slowly unrolled before an audience. A narrator would describe each scene as it appeared. These Crankies were not true panoramas, bur rather "contiguous views of passing scenery, as if seen from a boat or a train window."
One example, exhibited at the the 1900 Paris world's fair, was the Trans-Siberian Express Moving Panorama. Visitors could experience the luxury on board in real railway carriages.
"Behind the windows of four real carriages an ingenious mechanism provided the illusion of a moving train. Between a slowly rotating backdrop and a fast 'conveyor belt' with sand and stones two landscape paintings were moving at different speed, creating a parallax effect. Offering visitors a comprehensive experience, the Panorama Transsibérien included Russian and Chinese 'station restaurants'."
"At the bottom of the diagram are the three railroad cars (wagons). Above that is the revolving "sandy ground" which is on tread-mill-like machinery. This moved at 1,000 feet per minute. Next were low, cut-outs of bushes and schrubs moving at 400 feet per minute. Behind that was more distant, taller scenery moving at 130 feet per minute. The main moving panorama canvas moved the slowest at 16 feet per minute resulting in the illusion of depth, creating a parallax effect."
These train car panoramas them became popular in a variety of cities, and were also attractions at some amusement parks.
On October 19, 1878, Scientific American published a series of pictures depicting a horse in full gallop, along with instructions to view them through the zoetrope. The photos were taken by an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle a bet between California businessman Leland Stanford and his colleagues. Stanford contended that at some point in a horse's stride, all four hooves were off the ground. He enlisted Muybridge to take photographs of the positions of a horse's hooves in rapid succession. Muybridge's 12 pictures showed that Stanford had won the bet.
Muybridge then created the zoogyroscope, in 1879 - a sequential photo projector. At the same time, Etienne-Jules Mare fashioned a camera that could take 12 pictures per second of a moving object. The technique, called chronophotography, along with Muybridge's work, were the founding concepts for motion picture cameras and projectors.
New York City, in 1888, Thomas Edison and his British assistant William Dickson set out to create a device that could record moving pictures. Dickson unveiled a primitive motion picture camera, a "Kinetograph", in 1890. In 1892 he announced the invention of the Kinestoscope, a machine that could project the moving images onto a screen. Edison initiated public film screenings in recently-opened "Kinetograph Parlors" in 1894.
By the early 1920s, "moving pictures" had so improved and perfected their technology that stereo images and panoramas were no longer in vogue, although that is not to say that they no longer existed.
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In 1879, Faul Philippoteaux, a professional cyclorama painter and artist from France, was hired to capture the Battle Of Gettysburg for the a special display in Chicago.
"Philippoteaux arrived in Gettysburg in 1882 armed with a sketchbook, pencils, pens, and a simple guide book to help him locate the site of the climactic charge. The artist spent several weeks on the battlefield, observing details of the terrain and making hundreds of sketches. To help him recall the landscape with accuracy, Philippoteaux hired a Gettysburg photographer to produce a series of panoramic photographs for his use. These images are some of the earliest detailed photographs of Cemetery Ridge, the Angle and the "High Water Mark", and the field of Pickett's Charge. Philippoteaux was also lucky enough to interview a number of veterans of the battle, who helped with suggestions on how to depict the chaos of battle."
The Battle of Gettysburg Panoramic, which traveled to Northumberland County in the 1830s and 1850s, was possibly a smaller version of the 377 feet long, 42 feet high and weighs 12.5 ton version that is today at Gettysburg. Or perhaps not. There were at least 4 originals painted. One is still in existence but in poor condition, in North Carolina. Another was cut up for use as tents by native Americans on a Shoshone Indian Reservation after the turn of the century.
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From London to Paris: A newly discovered Moving Toy Panorama
A list of remaining panoramas from the 19th and 20th centuries, is kept by the International Panorama Council, and can be found here: https://panoramacouncil.org/en/what_we_do/resources/panoramas_and_related_art_forms_database/
- A Tale Of Two Cycloramas https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-tale-of-two-cycloramas.htm
- The Crankie Factory https://www.thecrankiefactory.com/
- https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/new-magic-lantern-journal/pdfs/4009779a.pdf
- The Panorama at the 1900 Expo https://retours.eu/en/22-panorama-transsiberien-expo-1900/
- Stereo World Magazine, Volume 28
- Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1978.
- Boardman, Sue and Kathryn Porch. The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama, A History and Guide. Gettysburg, Pa: Thomas Publications, 2008.
- Brenneman, Chris and Sue Boardman. The Gettysburg Cyclorama, The Turning Point of the Civil War on Canvas. El Dorado Hills, Ca: Savas Beatie LLC, 2015.
- Holzer, Harold and Mark E. Neely, Jr. Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory, The Civil War in Art. New York: Orion Books, 1993.
- Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
- Oeterrman, Stephan. The Panorama, History of a Mass Medium. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
- Olin, David J, “A Public-Private Partnership and International Collaboration Save an American Panorama Treasure,” in: The Panorama in the Old World and the New, edited by
- Gabriele Koller (Amberg, Germany: Buro Wilhelm. Verlag Koch-Schmidt-Wilhelm GbR, 2010) 120-125.
- Wilburn, Robert C, ”The Campaign to Preserve Gettysburg” in: The Panorama in the Old World and the New, edited by Gabriele Koller (Amberg, Germany: Buro Wilhelm. Verlag Koch-Schmidt-Wilhelm GbR, 2010) 126-128.