Rare Photobooth Photos of People During Edwardian Era

Photo booths have been in the zeitgeist since the late 1800s. 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”. A similar machine was patented only a year later in America by photographer Mathew Steffens.

By the early Edwardian era, photobooth self-portraits had become quite a craze.