Watch Sandow

Eugen Sandow was the first star to perform before Thomas Edison's Kinetograph camera. The film reprises the opening of his stage routine. Sandow had become a vaudeville star at the Chicago Columbian World Exposition and then settled into a long run as the headline attraction at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City. His visit to the Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey, was widely covered in the press. Edison and Sandow met and shook hands; the strongest man in the world meeting the most brilliant inventor of the age. That meeting, combined with the film of Sandow's performance, was used as a promotional tool by both men: it effectively promoted Eugen Sandow's book "Sandow on Physical Training" that appeared shortly thereafter and it provided valuable publicity for the commercial debut of Edison's Kinetoscope, then just five weeks away.