Jewish Invention Myths: The Photo Booth
The photo booth is one of those inventions we don’t think too much about now in the era of smart phones, Instagram and Tik Tok but it was (and to some extent still is) a significant part of people’s lives when they have to get or renew their passport or driving licence. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that jews claim that they invented that as well.
The basis of this claim is the fact that the modern photo booth – as in you put coins in and it takes and rapidly develops photos for you – was first created by a jew, but he didn’t invent the concept but rather came up with a faster way to do it and (more importantly) commercialise it.
Yet jews don’t claim that they improved the photo booth but rather they claim they invented it as ‘MNews’ does:
‘Anatol Marco Josepho – Photo booth
The Jew Anatol Josepho, born in Omsk in 1894, designed the world's first photo booth in New York in the early 1920s.’ (1)
Josepho – originally Anatol Josephewitz – did patent a form of photo booth in 1925, (2) but he wasn’t the first to do so as Nicholas Rhodes explains at ‘Outsnapped’:
‘The earliest photo booth patent was filed in 1888 by William Pope and Edward Poole in Baltimore, but there is no known record of a working version.
The first-ever working photo booth was made by French inventor T.E. Enjalbert in March 1889 and was presented later that same year at the World’s Fair in Paris. He named it the “Apparatus for Automatic Photography” (which sounded way cooler in french: Appareil pour la photographie automatique). A similar machine was patented only a year later in America by photographer Mathew Steffens. These earlier versions were not as impressive as they thought they would be as they still required a lot of manpower (at least 20 people) and were not as efficient as they intended them to be.’ (3)
‘ATA Photobooths’ agrees with Rhodes:
‘The history of photo booths begins in earnest back in 1889. This was the year in which the Eiffel Tower was opened, Charlie Chaplin was born, and the first edition of the Wall Street Journal was published.
The world’s first ever photo booth was also shown off this year at the historic World Fair in Paris. This was a coin-operated machine that took around 5 minutes to produce a photo on a thin metal sheet, amazing the visitors who were lucky enough to be there to give it a try.
If we fast forward to 1896 and hop across to Germany then we can see the introduction of the first automatic photo booth that included a negative and positive process. It was clearly a long way from the slick modern booths on sale these days but the history of photo booths was now well underway.’ (4)
So, no Anatol Josepho didn’t invent the photo booth in 1925; T.E. Enjalbert did in Paris in 1889 and in Carl Sasse of Germany invented the automatic production of photos from the photo booth in 1896 which became the basis of the first commercially viable photo booth business.
That’s another jewish invention myth down!
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3671736/The-history-of-the-photobooth.html
(3) https://outsnapped.com/history-of-the-photo-booth-from-inception-to-now/
(4) https://www.ataphotobooths.com/uncategorized/a-brief-but-fascinating-history-of-photo-booths/