Even in 1912, the entertainment group Pathé-Frères, based in France, had already become a landmark not only in the business of recorded music, but also in the business of film, which supposedly already accounted for half of the global sales 35mm film. They also had a huge catalog of entertainment films, and had perfected the ingenuity of coloring releases of movies, either by chemical dye or dye and its ingenious process color templates. Obviously, a bright spark at the headquarters of Pathé in Vincennes found a way to use some of the material from its catalog and keep running processing departments, toning and coloring templates. The trick was a small display of film strips hand - the first were made of a kind of cheap material of hard type (known in French as bouilli - which means leather boiled but perhaps boiled cardboard), later versions were made of bakelite brown and black pressed tin. The name of the product was immediately coined (and patented!) As Pathéorama. It is difficult to date the first products, certainly in the early 1920s had ads in newspapers and magazines French popular. I think one of my examples has a patent date of 1922. The device used a length movie 35mm film (used non-flammable safety films), with images and titles. However, the film had a set of cut perforations, allowing it to be patented again, ensuring the"" exclusivity"" that seemed to follow most Pathé products. The lid of the viewer opens to allow the filmstrip to be threaded, which is transported through the viewfinder using a small knob on the outside. In fact, there is enough space inside to accommodate a pair of additional film strips. Some time later, the viewer Pathéorama was reintroduced; well finished in black bakelite, he had an adjustable mirror on the back for better lighting; 30mm original (an edge of cut holes) and now strips normal 35mm film could be used, but also what is now known as color slides 35mm - 5 x 5 slides. Judging by the photos of the instruction booklet (sadly undated), I suppose that this device is definitely postwar, probably from the 1950s or so.
