![]() ![]() As one writer noted, “Supposing the instrument to contain 20 small pieces of glass, etc. Two years before he invented the kaleidoscope, Brewster was conducting experiments on “the polarization of light by successive reflections between plates of glass.” For his work in this area, he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society of London.Īnd it was while experimenting with the relationship between optics, light, and mirrors that he began to notice that when the reflectors were inclined toward each other, they created circular patterns as the image multiplied across the surfaces.Īs other scientists began working with the kaleidoscope, some found it useful as a tool to visualize massive numbers the possible variations produced by a single kaleidoscope were unprecedented. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)įor scientists of the era, Sir David Brewster’s invention offered them a tool to understand how optics functioned. While the object of the 19th century itself might look familiar to us today, the ways the culture valued this object were very different.Ī portrait of Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope. When Sir David Brewster submitted his patent for the kaleidoscope in 1817, he focused almost exclusively on describing its inner workings, noting in passing that these elements could be “either covered up with paper or leather or placed in a cylindrical or any other tube.” The base of the tube was typically filled with broken pieces of glass, ribbons, or other small trinkets. The kaleidoscopes on the streets of 19th century Britain were handheld and made from a range of materials, such as tubes made of brass with embellishments of wood or leather or those cheaply made of tin. How this beloved device went from adult obsession to throwaway juvenilia turns out to be a long, strange journey, one that has profound implications for the mobile devices you are carrying right now. Instead, this new mobile device was in the hands of everyone from children to the elderly from professors to pastors and was seen on nearly every public street in the UK where it was first invented. In fact, it wouldn’t become child’s toy for at least several decades. Within a month or two, the toy went into the toy box where it sat until being thrown away.īy contrast, the kaleidoscope of the early-and mid-1800s wasn’t just a child’s toy. In its base, it had plastic jewels that created patterns that would saturate when pointed directly at the sun. It was cheaply made and squished under my fingertips as I turned the dial. My first kaleidoscope was made of yellow cardboard with multicolored polka dots. The kaleidoscopes we can buy today, similar to the one I grew up with in the early-1980s, are not the same objects that came onto the scene in England. As Huhtamo explains it, “These ‘kaleidoscomanics’ are so mesmerized by the visions they see inside the ‘picture tube’ that they do not even notice that other men are courting their companions behind their backs.” Media scholar Erkki Huhtamo describes an engraving shown at the Frankfurt Film Museum, in which several people (and even a monkey!) are shown staring into their kaleidoscopes. If a person didn’t own a kaleidoscope, they could pay a “penny for a peek” from London’s poor or homeless, who earned a living by offering passersby a look into the patterns produced by what some termed as one of the “most important inventions and discoveries of our time.”Īrt from that period chronicled how immersive the kaleidoscope experience could be. A person couldn’t walk down a street in London without seeing people staring into these tubes and walking into walls from being so immersed in the new invention. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the years after the kaleidoscope was first invented in 1816, it distracted the public as much as an iPhone. An illustration from 1818, titled “Human Nonsense.” (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)
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