Published by Crown Publishers, New York, 2003

 

By Doug Boilesen, 2022

The Devil in the White City is another example of what has been called "fair fiction," a genre that uses the setting of a 'fair' in its story, i.e., the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

There are two references to Edison's Kinetoscope and one to Edison's phonograph in this book.

The first reference is part of an overall description of some of the things the fair's visitors were seeing, "devices and concepts new to them and to the world...They saw the first moving pictures on Edison's Kinetoscope..."

Historically, however, this reference to the kinetoscope at the fair has insufficient evidence to support that it was ever there despite all of the early publicity before the fair that "Edison will lead the procession this summer at Chicago with "perhaps greatest of his inventions, the kinetograph." Likewise, when the World's Columbian Exposition published their Official Guide of the World's Columbian Exhibition (before the fair opened) it wrote "among the most unique exhibits is the new kimetograph (sic) [kinetograph]."

For more details on the plan but the no-show of Edison's kinetograph/kinetoscope at the World's Columbian Exposition see Phonographia's "The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Kinetograph."

 

 

The second reference to Edison's kinetoscope is followed by a description of Edison's phonograph, a strange metal cylinder that could store voices. "A man in Europe talks to his wife in America by boxing up a cylinder full of conversation and sending it by express," the Rand, McNally guidebook said; "a lover talks by the hour into a cylinder, and his sweetheart hears as though the thousand leagues were but a yard."

 

Official Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition describing some uses of the Phonograph (p. 71).

For more details about the phonograph at the World's Columbian Exposition see Phonographia's "The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Phonograph."