In 1911, Swedish film company Svenska Biografteatern recorded its trip to New York.

Fortunately, the footage survived and most recently was speed-corrected (slowed down) and reproduced with the ambient audio of street sounds of car horns, horses, and police whistles to give us a sense of the environment back then.

There’s also a color version of the 8-minute long video restored via neural networks, featuring 60 frames per second and 4k image resolution.

Some observations:

• Notice all the people wearing hats
• The streets look a bit empty compared to today’s zoo
• Cable powered trolleys
• The kids go nuts when the camera is on them. Nothing’s changed!

This might be the closest we get to time travel.

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