A genuinely eccentric museum of Victorian and Edwardian popular entertainment, Sharp's houses a working collection of antique penny arcade machines, kinetoscopes, hand-cranked film projectors, and mechanical musical instruments. Most of the machines still work, and the staff will demonstrate them — including a Mutoscope that flicks through a sequence of photographs to create moving images, patented in 1894 and essentially unchanged in the collection.
The building shows films continuously in a small theatre equipped with period seating and a hand-operated projector. The collection is a reminder that moving images seemed like literal magic to the first audiences who saw them, and the machines make that sensation more tangible than any documentary could. It is a small museum but an unusual one, and children and adults engage with it equally well.