John P. Harris and Harry Davis converted a storefront on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh into a dedicated movie theater, charging five cents admission—hence 'nickel' plus 'odeon,' the Greek word for theater. The format spread rapidly across the United States, with thousands of nickelodeons opening within a few years, transforming film from a novelty sideshow attraction into a genuine mass entertainment industry.
Before the nickelodeon, moving pictures were mostly a vaudeville novelty—one act among many, or a peep-show curiosity viewed through a kinetoscope box by a single viewer at a time. Harris and Davis gambled that working-class audiences, especially immigrants who didn't need to read English to enjoy a silent film, would pay a nickel to sit and watch a program of short films.
The gamble paid off spectacularly. Within a decade, thousands of nickelodeons dotted American cities, often converted from storefronts, with a piano player providing live accompaniment and a barker outside hawking the show. Many early Hollywood moguls—Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, the Warner brothers—got their start as nickelodeon owners before building the vertically integrated studio system.
The nickelodeon era only lasted about a decade before larger, more comfortable movie palaces replaced the cramped storefronts, but it established cinema as a habit of everyday urban life, cheap enough for a factory worker's family and universal enough to cross language barriers.