Anatol Josepho (originally Josephewitz) was born in 1894 in Omsk, Russia. Far from the bustling capital city of Moscow, Omsk was a struggling industrial town populated by exiles and outcasts. Josepho’s father was a successful jeweller who was able to fund his son’s passions and dreams.

In 1900, Eastman Kodak released the, a small, handheld camera that was easy to operate and relatively affordable for the masses. Once 6-year-old Anatol laid his eyes on them, he was hooked on photography. His father enrolled him a local technical institute for photography lessons.

Nine years later, his father gave him enough money to travel the world and take up his first photo studio job in Berlin. When Anatol was 18, he tried to make it big in New York but couldn’t find a job there, so he went back home to Omsk instead.

He soon discovered that his hometown was ravaged by the Bolsheviks, so he travelled west to Budapest to set up his first studio. There, he started drawing up the plans for his biggest dream: a self-sufficient, coin-operated photobooth.

In the meantime, Josepho went across China and Mongolia to Shanghai, which in 1921 was the cultural capital of the East. He opened up another successful studio there, Josepho Studio. Throughout the years, he kept refining his prototype for a photographic process that was fast, affordable, and didn’t require negative film—this would later form the backbone of the Photomaton, the first commercially-successful photobooth.

In 1923, Josepho made his way to the United States for the second (and last) time. He went from Seattle to Hollywood to finally Manhattan, where he raised enough money to create the first photobooth prototype. At the time, he needed $11,000. This doesn’t sound like much in today’s money, but back then, it could buy 5 houses!

With his funding secured, Josepho put together a team of machinists and engineers to build his first prototype. They set up shop at a loft on 125th St. in Harlem and got to work. The result? A booth, enclosed with a curtain, that automatically produced a photo strip—8 photos total in just 8 minutes.

The first anonymous coin-operated photobooth debuted in Broadway, New York in 1925. Josepho opened up the Photomaton Studio, where he had installed three of his photobooths. Word got around and the photobooths became an instant hit. He was getting over 7,500 customers a day! In the next two decades, Josepho would expand his business to over 30,000 booths across the entire country.

The machine proved so popular that Henry Morganthau (the founder of the American Red Cross) took interest in the Photomaton. Morganthau purchased the U.S. patent rights in 1927 for $1 million, or $14 million in today’s money. The New York Times even published a headline that read, “Slot Photo Device Brings $1,000,000 to Young Inventor.” Almost overnight, Josepho’s work made him a millionaire.

Morganthau began opening up studios across the country. He established a factory in Long Island to start his distribution plans across the US and the world. At the end of the year, there were plans to sell the machine in Europe and Canada, thanks to a British investor group who purchased the distribution rights.

The popularity of the Photomaton invited tons of copycats over the years. Some of the most notable ones include the Photo-Movette, Auto-Photo-Dome, Photoweigh Machine, PDQ, and the Phototeria. This last machine was invented by Canadian David McCowan who actually found a way to make the machines smaller, but was unable to break into the American market.

One of the biggest threats to the Photomaton would, surprisingly enough, come from within the company’s ranks. John Anton Slack worked on the original machines, but he had ideas to take the design to the next level. One of his major innovations included speeding up the process and removing the booth’s need for a water supply. After refining his blueprints, Slack formed the American Picture Company and moved into his own photobooth studio on Broadway.

Another competitor arose in the wake of Slack’s departure from Josepho’s company. Herman Casler, a former colleague of Thomas Edison and the inventor of the Mutoscope, had a lot of experience in creating moving pictures. In 1930, he decided to expand his business into the photobooth industry. Casler created the Photo-See Model 100, which utilized ferrotype-based chemistry.

4 years later, a certain William Rabkin bought the International Mutoscope and Reel Company from Casler as well as the copyrights to the Photomaton. Rabkin wanted to improve on the design of these two popular photographic booth machines, and he did. By the 1940s, the Mutoscope Photomatic had booths in the NYC subway, the Staten Island Ferry, and the New York World’s Fair.

The original Photomatics are difficult to find because, in the 1940s-50s, rival Auto-Photo Co. went on an aggressive marketing and distribution campaign that would help them take over the United States photobooth industry. They even changed the way photobooths did business—instead of selling the machines, they rented them out. One of Auto-Photo Co’s biggest clients? Woolworth’s.

Not only did the Auto-Photo find its way into every major Woolworth’s store in America, they were also used by the police for its photos and mug shots. In 1964, the company introduced what would be its last black-and-white model, the Model 14. Soon after, a British-based company called Photo-Me bought the corporation.

By the 60s and 70s, photobooths were struggling a bit. Polaroids and other instant home cameras had just hit the market. Photobooths couldn’t compete with the accessibility and affordability of Polaroid photography, and sales declined.

Before the turn of the century, Photo-Me introduced lightweight digital colour photobooths that used computer software and printout paper, so you could get your photos much faster. At this point, the photobooth craze found its way to Japan, which of course made its own spin on the trend.

Purikura, derived from the English “print club”, were Japanese photo sticker booths where you could design the photos before printing them out. You could change the background, add stickers, and make cosmetic enhancements as well. These photobooths were developed by Atlus and Sega, and have made huge waves not only in Japan, but in the entire Asian market.