The first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey
On this day · 6 June 1933
A car-parts salesman patented the idea of watching films from your front seat, then opened the world's first drive-in.
On June 6, 1933, the world’s first drive-in movie theater opened just outside Camden, New Jersey, in Pennsauken Township. Its creator, Richard Hollingshead Jr., a sales manager at his father’s auto-products company, had tinkered in his own driveway — mounting a projector on his car hood, pinning a screen to the trees, and propping a radio behind it for sound.
Weeks earlier he had secured a U.S. patent (No. 1,909,537) for an arrangement of inclined parking stalls that let every car see the screen. Admission was 25 cents per car plus 25 cents per person. The opening feature was a British comedy, Wives Beware.
A local paper billed it as “the first automobile movie theater in the world.”
The format boomed after World War II, peaking at roughly 4,000 American drive-ins in the late 1950s before television and pricey land thinned the herd.
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