Motion picture technology has three roots that go back for centuries. The chemistry of film has its roots in still photography. The other two roots are projection, which had its origin in the magic lantern, and stills-in-motion, which began as toys that depended on persistence of vision.
Because it takes the eye and the brain a fraction of a second to lose an image, a series of still pictures presented in quick succession will appear as a single moving image. An examination of the flickering images of the persistence-of-vision devices built throughout the nineteenth century may lead to the conclusion that the invention of the motion picture was inevitable.
From the Thaumatrope, invented before photography, to devices with with complex names like the Phenakistoscope, the Praxinoscope, the Zoetrope, the Zoopraxiscope, the Omniscope, and the Stereofantascope, inventors strove to fool the eye. The Thaumatrope was a disk at the end of a string with different images on each side of the disk, such as a cage and a canary. Spinning the disk placed the canary inside the cage. The inventor was probably influenced by a scientific paper on persistence of vision by the remarkable Peter Roget, creator of Roget’s Thesaurus of English synonyms, and the inventor of the log log slide rule. Roget was also a respected physician.
In 1878, railroad baron Leland Stanford, ex-governor of California and founder of Stanford University, wanted to settle a bet on whether a trotting horse lifted all four hooves off the ground at the same time. He hired professional photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who, after several trials, set a row of twenty-four cameras along a racetrack. Strings that stretched across the track tripped the camera shutters as the horse trotted by. That resulted in a series of stills. Flipped in rapid succession, they displayed the horse in motion. (Stanford won his bet; all four feet lifted off the ground.)
Muybridge continued his experiments by photographing the movements of a variety of animals. Exhibiting his work in Paris, he met physician Etienne Jules Marey, who was doing research in such animal locomotion as the flapping of a bird’s wings. That meeting led Marey to take an important step forward in the invention of motion pictures.
Adapting a “photographic revolver” designed by astronomer Pierre Janssen to record the transit of Venus across the sun, Marey built a single camera that rapidly shot a series of pictures on a single plate. It did not require strings, which would have interfered with the fluttering wings.
Inventors in several countries solved other mechanical difficulties standing in the way of motion pictures; among them were William Friese-Greene in England and the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière in France.
Thomas Edison assigned assistant W.K.L. Dickson to build a motion picture system, based on the French “photographic revolver.” Edison originally thought of motion pictures as something to accompany the sound in his phonograph parlors.
Working in Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey with strips of celluloid film manufactured by George Eastman for his Kodak still cameras, Dickson invented the Kinetograph camera and the motor-driven “peep show” Kinetoscope, which ran 50 feet of film in about 30 seconds for one viewer at a time. Sprockets guided the film’s perforated edges past the lens with a controlled, intermittent movement like the ticking second hand of a watch.
To produce something to display, Dickson erected a studio building that could be turned to take advantage of sunlight; workers referred to the studio building as the “Black Maria,” because with its tarpaper covering it vaguely bore the shape of a police wagon with that nickname. Trained animal acts, circus entertainers, and the like performed there.
Kinetoscopes for viewing the films went into parlors modeled after Edison’s successful phonograph parlors, with the difference that admission was not free; customers paid one quarter for tickets allowing them to peep into five machines. Start the electric motor, gaze into the peephole, and there was magic! The viewer stared into a box to see the frames of film flicker by.
The inventive Dickson later built the Mutoscope peephole machine, with a series of cards that were flipped by a handle; Dickson made the Mutoscope different enough from his early Kinetoscope to get around Edison’s patent. (Mutoscopes can occasionally be found in old-fashioned penny arcades.)
Yet it was not projection, which appeared first in France. The Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, owners of a photographic products manufacturing business, set about to improve a Kinetoscope they saw on display in Paris. This they did with their Cinematographe, a combined camera, film printer, and projector. Substituting a hand crank for Edison’s electric motor, the Lumières reduced the machine’s weight so that they could carry it to any location. Edison’s bulky Kinetograph required performers to appear in the studio.
Where Edison’s films gave the view of a stage, the Lumière films were like a view through a window. In addition, the Lumières were able to project their films onto a screen for an audience, whereas Edison’s Kinetoscope accommodated only one viewer at a time.
Their first film, of workers leaving their factory, shot in March 1895, was shown at a special exhibit for photographers. On December 28, 1895, in the basement of a Paris cafe, the Lumières projected the first motion pictures presented before a paying audience. For one franc apiece the audience saw a twenty-minute program consisting of ten films, accompanied by a piano, commentary by the Lumière’s father, and their own gasps of amazement.5 In no time at all long lines formed outside the cafe to see the show. The movies were born!
Taken from:
Alphabet to Internet:
Mediated Communication in Our Lives
by Irving Fang
Rada Press, 2008
Go to:
http:www.radapress.com
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress