Wax

Creating life-size wax figures dates back to European funeral practices in the Middle Ages, and an exhibit of nearly 150 wax figures was on display in London in the early 1700s. Madame Tussaud, the person most people associate with wax museums, opened her first exhibit in London in 1835. By the end of the 19th century, there were wax museums in many of the world’s largest cities. The first wax museum in the United States was opened in St. Augustine, Florida in 1948 by George Potter, who’d visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London when he was a child. Despite an occasional article arguing otherwise, wax museums appear to be on the decline (a list I found online of closed wax museums in the United States ran to three pages, considerably longer than a list of operating wax museums would be). Memories of visiting a wax museum or two when I was a child, and the idea that this was a type of tourist attraction that was on the decline, is what drew me to this subject.