Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

In 1788, citizens of Edinburgh, Scotland swarmed to see a representation of their city painted around the inside of a colossal cylinder measuring 60 feet in diameter. Amazed visitors stood on a platform in the center of the cylinder, and, by turning slowly in a circle, were able to view a painted three hundred sixty degree cityscape of Edinburgh.

The inventor of this curious novelty was an Irishman, Robert Barker, who seemed to have a genius for painting accurate and lifelike scenes on such an unlikely canvas. Following the successful run of his Edinburgh exhibition, Barker mounted cylindrical paintings of the London cityscape and of the Napoleonic Wars.

The device needed a title, and the artist himself provided it. He called his wrap-around scenes panoramas, a word Barker fashioned from the Greek prefix pan, meaning "all," added to horama a deriviative of a Greek verb which means "to see."

Though the memory of Barker's cylinder paintings has faded, his word panorama survives, now generally to denote an overview of a cityscape or landscape. Panorama, etymologically a place to "see all."

Radio Script > Panorama