The Kinora: the first home cinema technology

Home cinema is a common practice in today's digital world. We consume movies, television series and social media videos at home on a daily basis. In times of YouTube and Netflix, watching moving images at home has become more popular and accessible than ever before.

Multiple home cinema technologies have been seen since the invention of cinema at the end of the 19th century - from screening reduction prints with analogue film projectors to viewing rental videos on the television screen with a VCR, all the way to DVDs, Blu-Rays and today's video streaming platforms.

In this blog post, we will look at one of the first home cinema technologies that emerged at the end of the 19th century: the Kinora.

The Kinora system

While the Kinora is almost forgotten nowadays, it used to be a relatively popular technology for home entertainment in the early 20th century. According to the British film historian Barry Anthony, who reconstructed the history of the Kinora system in his book The Kinora: Motion Pictures for the Home, 1896-1914, it was even considered 'the most successful of the "home movie" machines marketed in Britain before 1912'.

The Kinora system was originally invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1896, a year after they released the Cinématographe. Instead of projecting moving images on a screen, like the Cinématographe and later home cinema systems, the Kinora was designed as an individual viewing machine similar to the Mutoscope.

It made use of a flipbook mechanism to animate hundreds of paper-based photographs that were attached on a reel. By placing the reel on the Kinora viewer and turning the crank, the photographs were put in motion and could be watched while looking through the lens.

Kinora viewer

Kinora viewers varied from basic wooden hand-driven versions to luxury clockwork-driven models with multiple windows mounted on cast pedestals. The Kinora viewer depicted here is the basic model, which contains a wooden plate, a lens hood in the shape of a stereoscope viewer and two magnifying lenses inside this lens hood.

Part of the viewer's mechanism is a small metal stop that briefly pauses each of the curved image cards during rotation and thereby flattens them at the moment they become visible through the lens. This then creates an illusion of movement when watching the series of photographs in the viewer. Depending on the speed of rotation, a Kinora reel contains about 30-40 seconds of moving images.

Kinora reels

A typical Kinora reel contains a brass core, which holds 640 curved photographic images printed on bromide paper with an image size of 24mm x 19mm each. The reel's brass core includes a small hole that is used to mount the reel to the Kinora viewer.

Hundreds of Kinora reels and various Kinora viewers were manufactured, especially in France and the United Kingdom. Most Kinora reels were printed reproductions of professionally shot films, which people could buy or rent for home viewing purposes.

Kinora camera

A Kinora camera was introduced around 1908, which made it possible to make one's own Kinora home movies.

The camera recorded films on 1-inch (25.4mm) wide unperforated celluloid or light-sensitive paper. After recording, the film was developed and turned into a Kinora reel by the Kinora Company in London, so families could watch their own 'animated portraits' at home.

Kinora replica 3D model

As part of the project Doing Experimental Media Archaeology (DEMA) of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), a 3D model and replica of a Kinora were made in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg's Department of Engineering. The objective of the Kinora replica project was to better understand how the Kinora worked and was used as a home cinema technology in the past.

Making a 3D replica provided the opportunity to do experiments that would not have been possible with the original object. For instance, by making a flexible lens hood on the replica viewer, the optimal magnification of the lenses and the distance between them could be tested. We furthermore tested the optimal distance between the lens and the image as well as the optimal relation between the recorded frame rate and the viewer's speed of rotation.

Besides a replica Kinora viewer, also a replica Kinora reel was made. For this, we used a sequence of images from a digitised 16mm home movie, which was converted into 640 successive frames.

With the help of a laser cutter machine in the Engineering 3D Lab, the images were cut in the same dimensions as the image cards on an original reel. The image cards were then attached and glued to a 3D printed core of the reel, after which they were curved using a rubber band to get the desired effect in the viewer.

This blog was written as part of the CRAFTED project, which aimed to enrich and promote traditional and contemporary crafts.

The text of this blog is based on the article Replicating the Kinora: 3D modelling and printing as heuristics in digital media history by Tim van der Heijden and Claude Wolf, published in the Journal of Digital History in 2022. The Kinora Replica 3D Model was produced within the context of the project Doing Experimental Media Archaeology (DEMA) at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) in collaboration with the Department of Engineering (DoE) at the University of Luxembourg. The CRAFTED-DEMA dataset with high-quality photos, videos, sound recordings, 360-degree photos and 3D objects of the Kinora and various other analogue media objects is available at Europeana.eu.