Boston trolley ride 1903

This is an excerpt of footage from a 1903 Edison Biograph film. A camera was mounted on the front of a trolley as it meandered through the streets of Boston.

Edison would hire and train crews to run his not-for-sale cameras and send the crews around the world. They would shoot street scenes and then develop the film and show it in theaters the next day. Huge crowds would gather to see themselves and their cities for the first time in "motion pictures."

Paper contact prints were made of the original nitrate negative for this footage and filed for copyright purposes. The negatives were all destroyed (very flammable nitrate negatives never lasted!) but the paper contact print survived at the Library of Congress where it was held for the copyright records. In the 1950s a film company was hired to re-photograph each frame of these contact prints and that is the film you are seeing.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• boston
• trolley
• trolleys
• 1903
• edison

[rainydaywoman1957]

i want more of these!

[LetsBeProud]

Anyone noticed that Boston still looks the same.

[sauroid1]

Old Bostonian here, loved Jordan Marsh and the BPL shots. Washington St. sure looked busy then. Maybe my great grand parents were among those crowds.

[617AV86892]

Just think every last one of those people has passed on.

[inkey2]

@mlmr11 Part 2......another thing that was common then and in newton where I live a few houses still have them......"a hitching post" for horses.....some are very plain ....picture a black painted wrought iron pipe about 3 or 4 feet high, on top of that a baseball sized ball of wrought iron on the top...then through the round ball part a big iron ring....some actually had an iron horse head instead of a ball on top. People tied the leather reins of their horse to the ring

[inkey2]

@mlmr11 yeah, I have not been to Beacon hill in ages....like30 years.....but i do remember some houses still had boot scrapers on the front steps etc. Some were pretty plain lookinig...and if you didn'y know what it was there is no way you would even begin to guess using the mind of a 21st century person. Things were pretty primitive at the turn of the century....My late father was born in 1916 and had some amazing stories about the old days.......

[mlmr11]

@inkey2 My grandfather was in the textile industry as were all good Italian immigrants at this time. When he was out of work he would work as a street cleaner . He said in the summer time the smell of the horseshit would actually stick to your nostrils and that would be all you could smell for days even if you weren't any where near it.

[mlmr11]

@inkey2 OMG inkey they are all over Boston!! I never knew what those were for!!

[mlmr11]

Wow the old Jordan Marsh building ...The back bay never looked so authentic :)

[jgauthier522]

Lol...that video just goes to show you, that know matter what you do there is always going to be congestion & traffic in Boston.

[Trolleymoose]

Wow! Like a time machine. Looks like people had very lille concern for an approaching trolley. Things were sure busy then. Great footage.