I used to run into the late Jim Lipari (maker of this camera) occasionally in camera stores in Omaha. He and I were both inveterate seekers of weird old stuff, and the employees usually knew enough to hold onto peculiar, seemingly useless trade-in items until both of us had had a chance to look at them, rather than just throwing them away immediately.
Lipari was a nationally-known expert on Cirkut (note spelling) cameras, "Cirkut" being Kodak's brand name for what was sometimes generically known as a "banquet camera," because of its use early in the 20th century for photographing huge groups of people at gatherings such as banquets. These cameras worked somewhat similarly to the now-better-known Panon, Widelux, and Horizont panorama cameras, in that they involved scanning the film past a slit. However, rather than rotating the lens on a drum past the fixed film, as in the Panon/Widelux/Horizont concept, the Cirkuts rotated the entire camera on a geared base, pulling the film past a fixed slit as the camera moved. Obviously, it was necessary to have exact synchronization between the speed the film moved and the speed that the camera rotated, and this is what the adjustable sprockets and voltage control shown on the Lipari camera were designed to achieve. (Original turn-of-the-century Cirkuts did the whole thing via a clockwork mechanism.)
One advantage of this type of camera over a Panon/Widelux/Horizont was that you could have a picture angle as wide as you wanted, subject only to the length of film in it. It was perfectly possible to set up the camera in the middle of a circle of people and let it rotate a full 360 degrees, capturing the entire group. (A common prank of the era was for someone at one end of the group to wait until the camera had imaged him, then sprint around to the opposite end, causing him to appear in the picture twice.)
Incidentally, while the appearance of this camera may be awkward, Lipari's machine work undoubtedly would be top-notch. I wonder who's looking after the small but enthusiastic Cirkut/panorama crowd now that he's gone...?
