Chapter VIII: Introduction (5)

Frederic Langenheim, with U. S. patent No. 7,784, dated November 19, 1850, solved the problem. The Langenheim system was called “Hyalotype,” from the Greek, meaning “glass” and “to print” or to print on glass. Prior to the invention, some time in the winter of 1847–48, the period of the California Gold Rush, it was said the Langenheims, by means of a Viennese camera converted into a magic lantern equipped with a gas lamp, projected Daguerreotype pictures. This probably was achieved with the aid of a mirror system.

The early Langenheim glass projector slides were circular and of a deep sepia tint; later excellent black-and-white plates were made. The Langenheim glass photo slides reproduced nature on the screen “with fidelity truly astonishing.” The two plates of the slide were made adherent with Canada Balsam, which is still used in this way as well as to attach parts of projection lens systems. Only very recently have new synthetic resins begun to displace Canada Balsam for these purposes.

In 1851 the Langenheim Hyalotypes made their debut in Europe under great auspices, at the famous Exposition of the Works of All Nations at London. The glass projection photos were “very remarkable and well appreciated by competent visitors,” according to Robert Hunt, a pioneer British photographic authority, who inspected the exhibit and wrote about it.

There is no evidence that the Langenheims combined their glass projection slides with the magic disk of Plateau to achieve motion pictures. They made one contribution and seemed to be satisfied with that. And it was successful for them, for in the next twenty-five years many thousands of these slides were sold in the United States.

Others who perhaps were much more familiar with the Plateau-Stampfer magic disks than the Langenheims combined their process with the Wheel of Life. The link nevertheless with the Langenheims is direct and immediate. All the followers used the photos on glass slides and the method was popularized by the Langenheim exhibition at the Exposition. Relatively little was done, however, in combining the glass photo slides in motion picture sequence with the magic lantern, because at the time there was no method of obtaining a number of successive photos of the same action.

Jules Duboscq (1817–1886) in Paris copied the Langenheim process of glass plates with great success. Duboscq was an exhibitor of optical instruments at the Exposition of 1851. He had been the licensee of Daguerre for England, but the method was never popular there as it was in the United States. On February 16, 1852, Duboscq received a French patent on an apparatus which combined photos and the Plateau Phénakisticope or Fantascope. His device was called the Stereofantascope or Bioscope.

One Duboscq model had two strips of pictures made with a binocular camera running next to each other on a vertical disk, as the original Plateau model, and the whole was rapidly revolved before a mirror by a spectator who wore specially-made glasses. The second and better system had the pictures mounted on the horizontal Fantascope or Wheel of Life, as developed by Horner in 1834, with one picture mounted above the other. There was, however, slight distortion because the pictures were bent to fit around the inside of the cylinder.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), who also combined photos and the magic disk, in 1852, had a marked influence on magic picture development during the middle part of the 19th century. In fact, it may well be that the efforts expended in trying to combine the third dimensional effect of his stereoscope with the magic disk retarded development of screen projection of motion pictures.

Wheatstone was a timid man, though a great scientist, and frequently had the great Michael Faraday announce his inventions at the Royal Society meetings. The Stereoscope was invented in 1838. (The reader may recall that centuries before d’Aguilon had coined the name “Stereo” for “seeing solid” effects). The Stereoscope achieves its effect by blending into one image pictures or drawings of an object taken from slightly different points of view so that the impression of relief is obtained in our sense of vision. Without our two eyes the stereoscopic effect would not be possible.

It had been known for a very long time that the two eyes did not see the identical picture. Wheatstone made an instrument which took advantage of this fact. He said he conceived the idea in 1835 and made the first presentation of the Stereoscope in August of 1838 at a meeting of the British Association held at Newcastle.

In 1850 Wheatstone was in Paris and showed his improved Stereoscope to Abbé Moigno, to Soleil and his son-in-law, Duboscq, who were commercial instrument makers, and to members of the French Institute. Its value was immediately recognized not only for amusement but for the arts and sciences, especially portraiture and sculpture, Moigno reported in _La Presse_ of December 28, 1850. Duboscq immediately started to make one and used Daguerreotypes in it. Moigno praised Duboscq’s “intelligence, activity, affability, indefatigable ardour.” In 1851 Moigno brought Duboscq to the attention of the Queen by presenting her with a Wheatstone-type Stereoscope which he had made. That was the year Louis Napoleon seized power and was named president for a ten year term. In November, 1852 he proclaimed himself Emperor.

Wheatstone also developed a combination of photos and the Plateau disk which was fitted with a cog which made each photo rest momentarily as it was held before the mirror. The same instrument was made in France under the name of Heliocinegraphe.

Antoine François Jean Claudet (1797–1867), was a Frenchman who married an English girl and moved to London in 1827. In 1852 he combined the Plateau-Stampfer disk with the Langenheim method of photographs on glass plates. It is claimed that, while Claudet started work ahead of him, Duboscq had satisfactory results first. Claudet’s experiments were successful in May of 1852, about one year after the Langenheim exhibit at the Exposition. In 1853 Claudet became a member of the Royal Society.

Claudet, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Birmingham in September, 1865, spoke “On Moving Photographic figures, illustrating some phenomena of vision connected with the combination of the stereoscope and the phenakisticope by means of photography.” Claudet noted that from the beginning of photography those acquainted with Plateau’s disk thought that pictures would be more suitable than hand drawings to show the illusions of motion. But they also sought the third dimensional effect. Duboscq’s efforts were not completely successful, according to Claudet who described a machine he had worked out. The illusion of motion was effected by having one eye see one picture and the other eye the next picture. This resulted in a simultaneous motion and solid effect. The spectator was not conscious of the vision being transferred from one eye to another. Claudet’s example was a boxer about to strike and then delivering the blow.

The pictures in Claudet’s machine must have left much to the imagination but an interesting perfection of this device was shown in New York in late 1922 and early 1923, under the name of Hammond’s Teleview. An entire theatre was equipped with a special shutter device for each spectator. The shutters were synchronized with the shutter of the motion picture projector and the spectator, looking through the device, saw motion in three dimensions. The development was not commercially practicable because the apparatus was expensive, a nuisance to the spectators and the many little motors operating the shutters created an annoying hum in the auditorium.

In the United States the Langenheim brothers did much to popularize the Stereoscope and its various modifications. About 1850 they started to make and sell stereoscopic views in Philadelphia, by mail and through agents throughout the country. In those days, with the Gold Rush in California just subsiding, there was great interest in scenic wonders and views of remote places. Stereoscopic photos had a great sale and were eventually found in almost every parlor of the day.

Before the Civil War the Langenheims opened at 188 Chestnut Street the “Stereoscope Cosmorama Exhibit.” There each spectator sat and could see one stereoscopic view after another by turning a crank. It may very well have been this turning crank system which suggested an interesting motion picture device to the fellow citizen of Langenheims, Coleman Sellers.

Coleman Sellers (1827–1907) was a skilled engineer. He reproduced Faraday’s electric experiments in this country; constructed locomotives in Cincinnati chiefly for the Panama Railroad; he also worked on the Niagara Falls power development. Even for hobbies he turned to scientific toys and gadgets. In 1856 he was called to Philadelphia again to take his place in the family engineering company. Sellers’ family dated from one Samuel Sellers who received a royal grant of land in Pennsylvania in 1682.

Sellers patented on February 5, 1861 a device which he called the Kinematoscope, evidently the first use of the word “cinema” if we exclude the Frenchman who copied Wheatstone’s device under the name of Quinetoscope.

The Sellers device revolved a series of posed still pictures, paddle-wheel fashion, before the eye of the observer. A period of relative rest was achieved through this motion as each picture was coming towards the observer for a specific time and then out of view as the next photo came into position. Sellers’ motion photos include his wife sewing, his two sons, Coleman, Jr. and Horace, playing and rocking a chair. Sellers tried to combine motion and solid effects. He found the wet plate photographic process invented by Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857) in 1850 quite unsatisfactory for “posed” motion work. Archer did not trouble to patent the process.

During the Civil War the Langenheims took nearly 1,000 pictures which were mounted for showing in the projection magic lanterns, and during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71 several hundred photographs and drawings were released by the Langenheim brothers for lantern use. The last catalogue of the firm was published in 1874 and included some 6,000 colored slides priced at $33 a dozen, and those specially photographed and made at $4 each. William Langenheim died on May 4, 1874. Frederic tried to continue the business for a time but he, too, was getting old and eventually sold out in the Autumn to Caspar W. Briggs, another early Philadelphia photographer. At the Philadelphia exhibit Frederic had a showing of the Voigtlander lenses made in Vienna which were the best then available for certain types of photographic work.

Another Philadelphian, Henry Renno Heyl (1842–1919), a friend and associate of Sellers on the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Institute, was the first person in America to develop a projector which used “posed” motion photographs. The individual pictures were taken by the same method used by Sellers for his Kinematoscope.

American Museum of Photography

_LANGENHEIM BROTHERS, William (seated) and Frederic, pioneer Philadelphia photographers, who developed, in 1850, picture projection using glass slides._]

Somewhat earlier, O. B. Brown, of Malden, Mass. obtained U. S. patent No. 93,594, dated August 10, 1869, on what is the first American “motion picture” projector. It, however, used only drawn designs and not photographs. In principle it was based, as other projectors of the time, on the system developed by Uchatius. In Brown’s projector the Plateau magic disk with the figures was mounted between the light source and the projection lens and was rotated by a gear arrangement. In front of the lens there was a rotating shutter with two holes which interrupted the light when the pictures were in intermittent motion.

Maurice Bessy Collection

_ETIENNE JULES MAREY, French physiologist, whose research on the movement of men and animals contributed to progress in photography of motion, 1870 to 1890._]

Heyl perhaps may have obtained his basic idea from Brown or it may have come to him independently because the urge to combine the new photos and the older magic lantern was felt by many persons. At any rate, the Heyl apparatus bears very little relation to Brown’s. There is no evidence that Heyl attempted to patent his device, so the Patent Office never was called upon to decide the point.

Heyl, a native of Columbus, Ohio, who designed many types of machinery, including boxes and paper and book stitching devices, has been hailed by some as the first to use photos in a projection device. He himself, however, never claimed that honor. He published a letter dated Philadelphia, February 1, 1898, in the _Journal_ of the Franklin Institute, “A contribution to the history of the art of photographing living subjects in motion and reproducing the natural movements by the lantern.”

“Among the earliest public exhibitions” of such a combination was one given by him at an entertainment held in the Academy of Music, in Philadelphia on February 5, 1870. A catalogue note announced as a feature of the varied entertainment the showing of “The Phasmatrope, a most recent scientific invention,” whose effects are similar “to the familiar toy called the Zoetrope.” The management expressed pleasure at having “the first opportunity of presenting its merits to our audience.”

Heyl and a dancing partner posed for six pictures in the various phases of the waltz at O. H. Willard’s photographic studio at 1206 Chestnut Street. Other photo slides were made of a then popular Japanese acrobatic performer--“Little All Right.” The time exposures were taken on wet plates, then prints were transferred to thin glass plates with the images only about three quarters of an inch high.

The six stills were duplicated three times to fill the eighteen spaces in the wheel of the projector.

The Heyl projector had an intermittent movement controlled by a ratchet and pawl mechanism operated by a reciprocating bar moved up and down by the hand. The fast movement was used for the acrobats with a complete stop at the end of each somersault, and a slow tempo for the waltz which was accompanied by an orchestra.

The problem of a shutter to interrupt the light while the pictures were moving was solved in the following way, according to Heyl: “This was accomplished by a vibrating shutter placed back of the picture wheel that was operated on the same drawbar that moved the wheel, only the shutter movement was so timed that it moved first and covered the picture before the latter moved and completed the movement after the next picture was in place. This movement reduced to a great extent the flickering and gave very natural and life-like representations of the moving figures.”

Heyl’s Phasmatrope was an ingenious apparatus but the imagination had to compensate for its many imperfections. When it was demonstrated on March 16, 1870, at a meeting of the Franklin Institute, it created so little notice that mention of the showing was not included in the minutes. It is interesting to note it was at this meeting that Sellers was elected head of the Franklin Institute. We can wonder what his reaction was to the fact that Heyl, a man fifteen years his junior, had added projection to the principle of his Kinematoscope which had also used “posed pictures” in a peep-show apparatus.

In 1875, in Philadelphia, Caspar Briggs, who had bought out the Langenheim interest the year before, introduced a device similar to the Heyl projector which also used still photographs made of drawings to simulate motion. His most popular subject was “The Dancing Skeleton,” a selection reminiscent of Phantasmagoria and the “black arts” or necromancy. The little pictures were mounted on the edge of a mica disk which revolved before the projection lens. Briggs also improved the Langenheim magic lantern slide process and gave a further impetus to photographic activity in Philadelphia.

From the Langenheims and their contemporaries in America the spotlight of magic shadow development shifts back to the Old World, to France, and to a scientist of distinction.

_XIV_

MAREY AND MOVEMENT

_Marey in Paris, and Muybridge and
Isaacs in San Francisco, record motion
by photographs--Ducos du Hauron has an
idea for a complete system--Janssen makes
a “movie” camera--Reynauld keeps magic
shadow showmanship alive--Anschütz uses
electricity._

The development capital in the story of the magic shadow art-science shifted many times. Seas, mountains, oceans and time itself were no barriers. Successively, Greece, Arabia, Persia, England, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Austria and the United States took the lead in showing the way toward the goal of genuinely life-like pictures. After the great spurt of activity in Philadelphia, during the working life of the Langenheims, the chief center of activity was Paris and the leader was Etienne Jules Marey.

Plateau in Belgium came to the invention of the magic disk, which was the first “motion picture” device, through his study of vision and the desire to understand more about it. Marey, by his own action and the work of others influenced by him, gave great impetus to the photographing and projection of motion pictures, through his wish to learn more about movement, the movement of life--animals, birds, and men.

Marey was one of the first great physiologists and conducted for years what was then the only private, scientific laboratory in France. He was born in Beaume, France, in 1830, and when nineteen went to Paris to study medicine. Six years later he became an interne and, in 1859, received his doctor’s degree, doing at this time his first important work on animal locomotion. In 1869 he became a professor at the College of France and three years later he was admitted to the Academy of Medicine, and, in 1878, to the Academy of Science.

About 1867 Marey started to study the attitudes of animals in movement through the aid of a Plateau magic disk and drawings made with the aid of Mathias Duval, professor of anatomy at the School of Beaux Arts. Some of the designs used by Marey in the Wheel of Life and a magic lantern projector were drawn by Col. Duhousset, a great horseman and artist, from very early and imperfect instantaneous photographs.

Prior to Marey there had been a number of attempts to record motion by photography. The most successful was by the French astronomer, Pierre Jules César Janssen (1824–1907) who used a photogun, _Revolver Photographique_, to record the transit of Venus in Japan in 1874. Janssen may have been influenced by Marey’s earliest work. Dr. R. L. Maddox in 1871 had developed in England dry plate photography, based on Scott Archer’s wet plate process. This helped to make instantaneous photography, or Chronophotography, as it was called, possible.

Janssen perfected the first workable motion picture camera. But it was a large, stationary piece of apparatus, limited in scope and sensitiveness. The device was described by a French astronomer, C. Flammarion, in the magazine _La Nature_ of May 8, 1875, and by Janssen himself in the _Bulletin of the French Photographic Societies_ of April 7, 1876. Janssen’s device took forty-eight pictures on a simple revolving plate but he said the number could easily be doubled or tripled. A time clock mechanism controlled the revolutions of the photographic plate but it was so arranged that it could also be rotated by hand. An electrical hook-up also was possible.

The influence of Plateau’s magic disk is clear and so acknowledged by Janssen. The device simply reversed the old Plateau disk which showed motion pictures through two revolving disks, one with the pictures and the other with the shutter slits. In the Janssen astronomical gun the one disk was coated with photographic chemicals and the other had the usual slits; the necessary intermittent movement was provided by the gear driven mechanism which rotated the disks.

Janssen pointed out that the apparatus could be used for physiological purposes--to study walking, running, flight and the movement of animals; but he never had time to develop the device for physiological uses, which was not in his immediate field. He was, however, interested in Marey’s later refinements and applications.

The most important “precursor” of motion picture photography and projection, so far as the basic idea was concerned, was Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837–1920), a Frenchman who developed the first successful method of printing color pictures. Louis liked science, painting and music but was held back in school on account of poor health. At the age of 15, he was a good pianist. He began his experiments in natural color printing around 1859 and by the Fall of 1868 had achieved success. The public reaction was not enthusiastic and Louis became discouraged. Many persons were hostile to his method which he hoped would bring books, illustrated with many color plates, within reach of everyone (as others following his system eventually achieved). It was for this reason that he failed to exploit his camera and picture projector idea.

In March and December of 1864 Louis Ducos du Hauron took out the first patents on a complete motion picture system, including an apparatus to register and reproduce motion by photography. The French patent was described in these words, “Apparatus for the photographic reproduction of any view together with all changes the subject undergoes during a certain time.” A mechanic of Agen where Louis lived for many years with his older brother, Alcide, constructed a model of the device. It was not successful because the available photographic materials were not sufficiently sensitive. Ducos’ patent even provided for the use of “bands” of paper; bands or reels of film finally solved the motion picture problem but not until near the end of the 19th century. As in one of Uchatius’ projectors, the camera and projector of Louis Ducos du Hauron used a number of small lenses.

Other patents taken out by this small, slender, timid Frenchman who only became truly animated when talking about one of his inventions, included color photography in 1868, a horizontal wind-mill in 1869, a combined natural and photographic camera in 1874, photographic devices in 1888 and 1892. In 1896 he again turned to motion pictures, after others had perfected them, proposing an optical system intended to do away with all interruption of light in motion picture projection and photography.

Honors came very late in life to Ducos du Hauron and to his dying day he reproached himself for not exploiting sufficiently his ideas. But when he had tried to do this he encountered only indifference because the scientists were not interested in the work of one who was without academic status. Now Ducos du Hauron is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses of photography. He actually predicted and described a monopack color film. The many good color processes of this type are modern realizations of his extraordinary scientific analyses.

Marey was familiar in a general way with all these developments and ideas, but he was essentially a scientist and not a photographer. Motion picture photography to him was just a good way of learning more about living movement. About 1870 he had made studies of movements in other ways in addition to primitive photographs and drawings made from such photographs. The results of these studies were known all over the world and had a direct influence on the photographers who first successfully took successive pictures of animals in motion. These photographers were Eadweard Muybridge and John D. Isaacs.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), or Edward James Muggeridge, as he was originally named, was born in England, at Kingston-on-Thames. As a young man he was an adventurer who called photography his profession. He made a number of trips back and forth between the United States and England. He was seriously injured in a run-away stage coach accident in July of 1860, in Arkansas, and later obtained several thousand dollars in damages from the Southern Overland Stage Company. Returning to the United States after a visit in England, following the accident, Muybridge received an assignment to photograph, for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the new territory of Alaska, purchased by the United States in 1867. After this assignment he settled in San Francisco.

In 1872 Governor Leland Stanford of California made a $25,000 bet in connection with a dispute as to whether or not all the legs of a horse running at a full gallop are off the ground simultaneously. The eye was not quick enough to find the answer. Horsemen had never been completely satisfied with the drawings and pictures made by artists of horses in motion. Sanford, as Terry Ramsaye describes in his history of the motion picture, _A Million and One Nights_, in 1872 sent for the photographer Muybridge and had him go to the Sacramento race track to get photographic proof in order to settle the dispute. Over a period of years Stanford spent considerably more than the $25,000 wager on the photographic experiments. And out of the experiments grew the legend that Muybridge had invented “motion pictures.”

About 1870 Marey had established the movement of the legs of a horse in a gallop through his physiological investigations. But at that time he had no photographic proof of his theory. Years later Muybridge said that Stanford obtained his basic ideas for photographs to win the bet from the writings of Marey.

Muybridge might have been successful in his early experiments if it had not been for an interruption which was of about five years’ duration. He had domestic troubles of a nature that ended in violence. In October 1874, he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyn who had eloped with his wife. After a sensational trial in which the defense was able to succeed in putting the jurors mentally in Muybridge’s place, he was acquitted on February 5, 1875, at the courthouse in Napa, California.

Stanford maintained a friendly interest in Muybridge because he had become increasingly interested in the problem of the movements of a horse in fast action and he wished to obtain evidence to confirm the new theory of animal locomotion which had been developed chiefly by Marey in France. Stanford was primarily interested in the running gaits of horses and other movements secondarily.

The stories of what really happened in 1877 are not identical. Muybridge said in 1883 at a lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, “Being much interested with the experiments of Professor Marey... I invented a method of employing a number of cameras .... I explained my intended experiments to a wealthy resident of San Francisco, Mr. Stanford, who liberally agreed to place the resources of his stock breeding farm at my disposal and to reimburse the expenses of my investigation, upon the condition of my supplying him, for his private use, with a few copies of the contemplated results.”

On the mere statement, Muybridge’s position is subject to serious question. It certainly is unlikely that Stanford would pay all expenses just to obtain a few copies of the “intended results for private use.” The ownership of the results was subject to considerable dispute. Stanford copyrighted the pictures in 1881 and had them published in a book edited by Dr. J. D. B. Stillman, entitled _The Horse in Motion_. In that book the story is that when Muybridge returned to San Francisco in 1877, he was engaged to continue the experiments by Stanford. According to Stillman, in 1877 pictures were taken of one of Stanford’s horses, with a single camera and “one of these, representing him with all his feet clear of the ground, was enlarged, retouched and distributed to the parties interested.” This then was just another effort to obtain a good, sharp, fast, single picture of action.

John D. Isaacs, later chief engineer for the Harriman Railroad System, had designed and supervised all the installation of the battery camera apparatus. His name was suggested to Stanford by Arthur Brown, then chief engineer of maintenance of the Central Pacific, one of Stanford’s interests. Isaacs was a young man fresh from the University of Virginia, where he had graduated in 1875. He was an amateur photographer and very familiar with Marey’s work and that of the photographers in France and England and in the eastern part of the United States.

In 1878 further efforts were made at Stanford’s private track at Palo Alto, where the battery system of cameras was introduced and good results obtained. Each camera in the battery was equipped with a fast-acting shutter and was set off successively by a mechanical-electrical device. (Illustration on opposite page.)

The most successful results, which were little better than silhouettes, were obtained when twenty-four cameras, set about one foot apart, were used. The photographs actually were not made at equal intervals of time but of space. The cameras and background were lined up for a measurement of distance and not of time.

Although Isaacs contributed engineering skill to the development of the apparatus, because he was chiefly interested in railroad engineering and this assignment in his photographic hobby was a favor for the “big boss,” Muybridge alone obtained the patents on the method. On June 27 and July 11, 1878 he applied for a patent on, “A method and apparatus for photographing objects in motion” (the battery system), and for the double action shutter controls. The patents were issued in March, 1879. Wet collodion plates were used in each camera and a speed of up to 1/5000th of a second was claimed by Muybridge in his applications. Isaacs later became chief engineer of the Southern Pacific Railroad System while Muybridge made “scientific” photography a profession.

The Horse in Motion, 1882

_CAMERA SYSTEM developed by John D. Isaacs, engineer, and Eadweard Muybridge, photographer, which made pictures at equal intervals of space rather than of time. It settled a wager on the nature of the movements of a horse._]

During later life Muybridge sought to establish himself as a scientist and in this effort he drew heavily on physiological data which originated with Marey in France. Muybridge was a photographer, who, through the resources of Stanford, a rich and determined backer, came into possession of a method of taking successive pictures of action. Even though the method was cumbersome and inexact, Muybridge never changed it but continued to exploit it for the rest of his life.

La Nature. 1882

_PHYSIOLOGICAL PARK. Paris, above, the first motion picture studio. Marey installed the camera in a box on rails. Below, Marey’s photo gun, first portable camera for photographing motion._]

Marey, in France, was delighted to hear of the results of Muybridge’s work and to inspect them, for here at last was excellent confirmation of his physiological theories. Marey, while praising the work of Muybridge, noted certain errors resulting from the battery camera system--the landscape and not the animal appeared to be moving when the resulting photographs were analyzed in the Plateau magic disk and also the time interval, as noted above, was not exact.

Marey was the first to synthesize motion from the photographs by mounting them so the action could be reconstructed. Muybridge had no interest in this phase of the subject until he met Marey and learned from him. Even afterwards Muybridge continued to be interested chiefly in taking pictures and not in studying and analyzing them. Technically speaking, Marey analyzed and synthesized the results obtained in the Muybridge photographs.

In addition to using the simple Plateau disk which only one person at a time could see, Marey somewhat later had the photographs copied on glass slides, mounted on a revolving disk and projected onto a screen with the Uchatius type projector, equipped with a revolving slit shutter. This scientific demonstration was the first actual motion picture show of real motion and not posed as in the Heyl, Bourbouze and other demonstrations of about 1870.

Gaston Tissandier, editor of _La Nature_, in the December 7, 1878, issue wrote on “The Attitudes of the Horse, represented by instantaneous photography,” and discussed the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge of San Francisco which were on display at the firm of Brandon and Morgan Brown, 1, Rue Lafitte, Paris. The early work of Marey was mentioned and the importance of the new pictures was stressed.

On December 28, 1878, a letter of Marey’s, published in _La Nature_, expressed the hope that Muybridge would also record and analyze the action of birds in flight as well as animals in motion. Marey mentioned how effective such pictures would be in the Wheel of Life disks and their value in zoology. There also Marey spoke of a photographic gun which he was to invent later.

A return letter from Muybridge was published on February 17, 1879 in the same magazine: “Please have the goodness to transmit to Professor Marey the assurance of my highest esteem and tell him that the reading of his celebrated book on animal mechanism had inspired Governor Stanford with the first idea of the possibility of solving the problem of locomotion with the aid of photography. Mr. Stanford consulted me in this matter and, on his request, I decided to undertake the task. He asked me to follow a most complete series of experiments.” Muybridge said also that he was using as many as thirty cameras, mounted twelve inches apart, and that he planned to study all movements, including flights of birds in which Marey was so interested at the time.

In the March 17 issue of _La Nature_, Marey expressed pleasure that Muybridge was undertaking study of birds in flight. In the same issue there appeared an interesting letter from Eugene Vassel, Captain of Armament at the Suez Canal, dated January 20, 1879, commenting on Marey’s idea of a photographic gun and telling of an idea for a similar automatic camera. This illustrates that at the time, even at the ends of the earth, farthest removed from principal educational and scientific centers, the problem of photographing objects in natural movement was under study. It was then a long way, indeed, from Paris to San Francisco to Suez.

By 1880 Plateau magic disks equipped with Muybridge photographs were on sale in England and at about the same time in France. In the December 31, 1881, issue of _La Nature_ several of these were illustrated and the possibilities of their use for instruction and entertainment were discussed. It was evident that they were common as toys in Paris. Subjects included the original one of a horse in motion and even a comedy item of a mule kicking a ball.

Muybridge, in the Summer of 1881, went to Paris and there came directly under the influence of Marey who was always most generous in expressing his appreciation of valued work. In this Marey’s nature reminds one of Plateau, the Belgian. Evidently Muybridge had not dreamed of the importance of his pictures for physiological study and other such purposes until it was explained to him. It was the pressing quest of Marey for greater perfection in duplicating nature that gave a great stimulus to the development of the motion picture art-science. Perhaps he, too, would have been surprised had he known that the motion picture, while a great instrument of science, would for many years at least find its chief use as an entertainment medium. To the last, Marey always thought of it for science and, while he did not disdain amusement uses, his interest was exclusively in broadening the field of knowledge.

In Paris Muybridge met many notables, including Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), French painter who specialized in great detail and exact duplication of nature. Meissonier appreciated the value of the Muybridge photos, as he did Marey’s work in analyzing motion in animals and men, as an aid to painting. From that time on Meissonier always kept a Plateau disk and projection device in his studio so that photographs of objects which were to be painted could be studied first by himself and his colleagues. Muybridge evidently took a liking to Meissonier and his work because he singled him out in later years as a painter (one of the few) who was exact in his representation of animals in movement even before the evidence of instantaneous photographs was available.

During his visit in Paris Muybridge not only obtained scientific knowledge from Marey and his associates but took up a practical projection device, even to the extent of appropriating the name from Charles Reynaud, a French inventor who was later to be the first great motion picture showman, even though he preferred using hand-drawn films to photographs.

Charles Emile Reynaud (1844–1918) in 1877 developed the Praxinoscope which was an ingenious arrangement of the Plateau magic disk device. The several pictures were mounted on the inside of a horizontal wheel and were viewed on a polygonal-mirror in the center. In this device a number of spectators could watch the moving figures. Light was reflected from a lamp mounted above. Photographs were also used in various of the Praxinoscope models. It was useful for color research. In an article in _La Nature_ of February 1, 1879, it was stated that Mr. Reynaud had already planned a projection model which would throw life-size figures from the Praxinoscope onto a screen before a large audience. In 1880 the French Society of Photographers was asked to interest itself in this problem.

In 1881, or in the following year, Reynaud achieved success with the Projection Praxinoscope or Lamposcope described by Gaston Tissandier, in the November 4, 1882, issue of _La Nature_. One lantern threw the background and the moving device projected the motion pictures. The designs were colored on glass slides which were joined in a band. A special advantage of the Reynaud Projection Praxinoscope or Lamposcope was that no special light source was required. A common table lamp was suitable. Of course, only one scene at a time could be shown in the device for it had no reels to handle the band of glass slides.

One evening, early in 1882, Marey had Muybridge present at a large gathering. Helmholtz, Bjerknes, Govi, Crookes and others of the French Academy of Science also were present. The projector fitted with Muybridge’s photos of action was given its debut. Marey, years later, commented that those scientists never had seen anything that went so far in the reproduction of nature as Muybridge-type photographs mounted in his Zoopraxinographoscope disk and projector.

In March of 1882 Muybridge was in his native England and presented two showings of his photographs, illustrated with a projector which he called the Zoopraxiscope, borrowing the name almost entirely from Reynaud and the scientific data from Marey. Muybridge gave a lecture, “Attitudes of Animals in Motion, illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope,” at a special meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, held on March 13, 1882, with His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, honorary member, presiding. The material was previously presented in a paper read before the Royal Society. Muybridge said, “The analyses of some of the movements investigated by the aid of electro-photographic exposures ... are rendered more perfectly intelligible by the reproduction of the actual motion projection on a screen through the zoopraxiscope.”

The walk, trot, amble, rack, canter, run and gallop--which are the several gaits of a horse--were discussed at length with much emphasis on the physiological aspects. Figuratively, Marey must have been standing beside Muybridge as he talked. The lecture, virtually word for word, was given by Muybridge in February, 1833, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. But it is significant to note that then there was no mention of the Zoopraxiscope. Muybridge evidently was not a good operator and there seems to have been difficulty with the projector. Operation of the projector was a problem then because there had to be a relation between the number of pictures and the slits in the projection shutter. Muybridge seems to have found it all too much trouble and turned to the task of taking successive stills which could then be made up into handsome illustrated books.

Meanwhile, Marey in the Spring of 1882 finally finished work on his Photographical Gun which he had conceived several years previously. By this time Marey had a large open air studio set up in the Bois de Boulogne. (Illustrations facing page 121.)

Marey said that he had worked twelve years on the general subject of movement, thereby placing his first efforts back in 1870. The “beautiful instantaneous photographs of Muybridge proved his work,” he declared. He continued, saying that in 1878 he had the idea of a photographic gun somewhat analogous to the astronomical revolver of Janssen. Finally, he resolved to devote the Winter of 1882 to the realization of the project.

Marey used his gun to study his favorite project of birds in flight. Marey’s photographic gun was the first practical motion picture camera, primitive and limited though it was. In this sense it was the original of all newsreel and other portable motion picture cameras. It is worth noting that in our own time cameras are mounted as “photographic guns” in airplanes as a substitute for gunnery in peacetime and as a check on results during war.

About this time, Georges Demeny (1850–1917) became associated with Marey in this work. Marey always gave credit to his pupil, aide and collaborator. Eventually, however, they parted company because Demeny was interested in commercializing the work and Marey wished to continue with pure science. Later Demeny asserted that his motion picture ideas were superior to Marey’s and that he was responsible for the actual execution of all the plans. Demeny at thirteen had begun inventing at his home, but his father, a musician, wanted him to be a university professor. In 1874 he went to Paris and at the Sorbonne was a pupil of Marey in physiology and of Mathias Duval--who also worked with Marey--in anatomy. He did some medical studies and opened one of the first physical education establishments called, _Le Cercle de Gymnastique Rationnelle_. From 1880 on he supervised many of the studies at Marey’s Physiological Park.

In July, 1882, Marey proposed the use of a band of sensitized paper in the camera. For various reasons the paper was not satisfactory and, of course, was impractical for direct projection as it might be set on fire by the projection lamp. The Langenheims of Philadelphia had solved the problem of projecting photographs in the magic lantern by devising a method of printing the picture on glass. However, a projector equipped, as the original model of Uchatius, with a revolving disk could only hold a few glass slides. This limited the projected pictures to brief action.

In 1887 and 1888 Marey achieved his first real success in what he called chronophotography, using a box machine which took eight pictures a second on a single metal plate, or on a sensitized paper band. Marey had difficulty controlling the paper film because it was not perforated and the pictures were not equally spaced. This, however, made no difference to Marey since his main purpose was to obtain data for physiological study, and not entertainment motion pictures.

In 1888 Marey obtained a successful series of photographs of fishes swimming, taken with intermittent action on a paper roll film. The images were taken at the rate of either twenty or sixty per second. This method of using paper strips obviates the necessity of operating in a dark camera chamber. At first the paper photographic strips were loaded in a dark room, limiting the scope of the camera, but later light-proof cameras were perfected. Marey also proposed an optical system featuring a turning mirror which would make intermittent action unnecessary. But this method was wasteful of film.

A contemporary of Marey and Muybridge, and a skilled photographer in his own right, was Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907), a German who worked out one of the best systems for exhibiting a series of pictures prior to Edison on whom he had an influence. Shortly after the Muybridge pictures came to Europe, Anschütz began similar experiments. According to Marey, he achieved better results than Muybridge, though the results were not perfect, having a certain amount of distortion. Anschütz obtained sharper photographs of action than Muybridge for his pictures could be used in the Plateau magic disk or the projector without being copied as silhouettes as was done with Muybridge’s photographs until a late date.

In 1883 Anschütz tried to use a single camera on the Marey gun principle but achieved better results with a battery of as many as forty-eight cameras. The shutter openings in the Zoetrope or magic disk were modified according to the number of pictures in the particular series.

Anschütz’s chief claim to fame rests on the fact that he was the first to combine successfully the instantaneous pictures of an object in motion with the brilliant intermittent flash of the electric Geissler tube. Heinrich Geissler (1814–1879), a German mechanic and physicist, about 1854 invented an electric tube for the purpose of studying discharges in rarefied gases. The apparatus consisted of a thin tube of glass, equipped with platinum wires sealed into each end and filled with a rarefied gas, and an electric battery connection.

In 1889 Anschütz announced the Electrical Tachyscope, a motion picture viewing machine which became popular all over the world. His action photographs were mounted on a wheel and were lighted successively by a Geissler tube’s intermittent electric flash. The large photographs were viewed directly by the audience in an adjoining room. Anschütz’s device was first depicted in the United States in the _Scientific American_ of November 16, 1889. A slot machine model was also devised and was shown at Frankfurt, Germany in 1891, and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where several persons saw it and were given the idea of attempting to achieve projection of life-size motion pictures of complete actions instead of mere phases of motion. (Illustration facing page 149.)

The general technique developed by Anschütz in his Electrical Tachyscope is now used in the taking of stroboscopic motion pictures. It also may be applied in new photographic, motion picture and television processes for increased depth of field.

In 1893 Muybridge lectured at the World’s Fair in Chicago at the Zoopraxographical Hall, where hundreds of his pictures were shown. The same material was published by the University of Pennsylvania under the title of _Descriptive Zoopraxography, or the science of animal locomotion made popular_.

Muybridge had settled down in 1885 with a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took many pictures with the same battery system, borrowing, however, some ideas about the studio arrangements from Marey. Muybridge never improved his technique or realized that such a cumbersome method could not produce satisfactory results. This did not seem to disturb him for there is no evidence that he sought large screen projection of the magic shadows before audiences.

In February 1886, Muybridge visited Edison at his New Jersey laboratory and showed him plates of successive motion pictures, or, more accurately, a succession of stills of various phases of the same action.

When Muybridge lectured at the London Institution in the Fall of 1889 a complete report was published in the _British Journal of Photography_ for December 20, 1889, in an article by W. P. Adams. From this we learn that Muybridge was then using a simple projector fitted with a gear system which revolved before the lens a glass disk of some fifteen inches in diameter on which the photos were mounted; in front of this was a zinc shutter disk with radial slits totalling one more than the number of pictures, in order to give a forward motion to the figures. That was the old Plateau magic disk idea. With the same number of openings in the shutter as pictures, the figures would appear to move their arms and legs and yet stay in the same place; if less shutter openings, there would be an appearance of backward motion. “The disks are rotated at the same speed in opposite directions, and the figures rapidly following each other appear on the screen as a continuous movement of the animal,” the English reviewer remarked. Muybridge showed slow and normal action motion. The subjects included a mule kicking, a woman emptying a pail of water, a girl walking down steps carrying a breakfast cup and saucer, and what was said to be the best of all, a little girl finding and picking up a doll. In passing, we may note that in addition to singling out Meissonier for praise, Muybridge asserted that the Japanese were far ahead of everyone else in representing motion in art!

Muybridge eventually retired to his native Kingston, England, after winning fame through his work in America. But he obtained more than fame, for he was able to leave a considerable sum of money, in addition to his instruments, to the local museum. Efforts to locate the Muybridge instruments at the Kingston-on-Thames Museum in 1943 were unsuccessful.

In 1889, Thomas A. Edison, already working on the problem of motion pictures for a year or two, visited the Exposition at Paris and there met Marey who showed him the results obtained with his methods of motion photography, and the reproduction of the scene with a Plateau-disk combined with a projector and the disk illuminated by an electric Geissler tube.

This electrically driven machine, displayed at the exhibit of Fontaine, a French engineer, showed pictures of animals in motion, as well as men and birds. The old photo stand-by of horses in motion in different gaits again was featured. This system rather pleased Marey, as he remarked that it would be hard to construct a better Wheel of Life, though Edison had even then accomplished it in his laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey. The limitations of the method, however, were fully recognized by Marey who mentioned the small number of images which could be shown, the restricted enlargement, and the intermittent movement troubles. Also, the device was noisy and the flicker had not been eliminated.

Thus the year of 1889 brought together two great figures, Marey, a pure scientist whose zeal for learning about locomotion resulted in improvements in what was to be the motion picture art-science, and Edison who invented the first entirely practical motion picture camera and the first film peep-show device which was to be the inspiration for projectors as they were finally established, setting the pattern even to our day.

_XV_

EDISON’S PEEP-SHOW

_Edison turns to motion
pictures--Donisthorpe of England works it
all out on paper--Eastman manufactures
film--Edison perfects a motion picture
camera, the Kinetograph, and a peep-hole
viewer, the Kinetoscope--World Premiere,
New York--April, 1894._

In the laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison the development of a practicable motion picture camera and viewing apparatus was really achieved. Leadership in the magic shadow art-science came with Edison once again to the United States and it has not left this country since. As a sequel America and motion pictures are linked in the minds of millions throughout the world.

Edison came to the motion picture through his Talking Phonograph, which he had developed not as an entertainment machine but as a device which would be a substitute for the court reporter and in other proceedings requiring exact recording. The motion picture experiments were made rather as a hobby and a diversion from more serious research and invention; the aim was to combine the automatic hearing and speaking of the phonograph with the sight and action of the motion picture.

Curiously enough Plateau, a man who went blind, made the first motion picture possible; Edison who was quite deaf made a great contribution to recording and reproducing sound.

Edison, in November of 1877, sent to his friend Alfred Hopkins, editor of the _Scientific American_, several sketches of models of his new invention in which “speech was capable of indefinite repetition from automatic records.” The next month a model was perfected. The incident was described as follows in the December 22, 1877, issue of the _Scientific American_: “Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned the crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that _it_ was well, and bid us a cordial good night.” It was noted that the sound was fully audible to a dozen members of the staff who gathered around. The writer also noted, “When it becomes possible to magnify the sound, as it doubtless will, the witness in court will have his own testimony repeated. The testator will repeat his own will.”

The editor of the _Scientific American_ concluded his comment on the Edison “Talking” phonograph by saying: “It is already possible to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience (i.e., still pictures). Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.”

The description of the Edison phonograph attracted wide attention. The article referred to above was quoted fully in _Nature_, a British publication. This led Wordsworth Donisthorpe to set down the first complete plan of the talking motion picture. Others, of course, had had the idea but up to that time the plan had never been expressed so clearly and completely.

Wordsworth Donisthorpe, born in 1847, was an English lawyer who throughout life maintained a lively interest in many affairs. He was an outspoken individualist, being a firm believer in local government. He wrote books on such subjects as _Law in a Free State_, and _Love and Law_, as well as on scientific matters. When he designed his device, the Kinesigraph, he was living at Princes Park, Liverpool.

After reading about Edison’s phonograph, Donisthorpe wrote to the _Nature_ magazine and referred to the idea of combining the phonograph and still projection suggested by the Editor of the _Scientific American_. Donisthorpe quoted that comment and then said: