British Mutoscope featuring Charlie Chaplin reel

The mutoscope was an early motion-picture machine that worked like a flipbook. Instead of continuous prints in a book, the mutoscope’s cards were attached to a reel and the images were animated when you turned a hand crank, much like Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. It was also similar because it didn’t feature projection and only one person could view it at a time. Mutoscope scenes were silent (hence the name) and lasted for one minute. One of the machine’s most famous reels was What the Butler Saw, an early erotic film showing a woman partly undressing as if spied through a keyhole. This reel was so popular that the mutoscope was sometimes known as the ‘What the Butler Saw’ machine.