LITMIR.BIZ

      Muybridge painted copies of 24 photographs on 16-inch discs and spun them rapidly to create the illusion of movement.

      Author Leslie Wood observes:

       "...the true importance of the pictures of the galloping horse lies in the fact that they were photographs of real and continuous movement and not posed pictures to counterfeit action."

      Ottomar Anschütz spent a decade refining the Schnellseher, which displayed a series of photographs. The images were fixed on a spinning disk and intermittently lit from behind. Anschütz, like Muybridge, toured his device on a lecture circuit across Germany to interested scientific and photographic groups. It included a series of images called Sprechende Porträts, or Speaking Portraits.

      French scientist and physiologist, Étienne-Jules Marey attended a demonstration of Muybridge’s next device, the Zoopraxiscope.

      Marey was acutely interested in a better way to record the motion of people and animals to film. With his assistant Georges Demenÿ, Marey built a camera called the Chronophotographe that used a new technique. The Museum of Modern Art describes the camera in exhibition notes:

       "Unlike Muybridge, who used a battery of cameras to make a sequence of separate frames (like the frames in a movie), Marey recorded the successive phases of motion on single plate."

      While Marey did not directly contribute to the emerging moving pictures industry - he did not use celluloid film, nor perforated stock or a claw mechanism in his apparatus - author Robert Leggat states:

       "These chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of film that passed automatically through a camera of his own design) had an important influence on both science and the arts and helped lay the foundation of motion pictures."

      Marey and Demenÿ record images of local gymnasts, including instructor Henri Joly, to test their device.

      Meanwhile, Auguste Lumière returned from military service to find his father’s factory bankrupt. With his 17-year-old brother Louis, he invented a new dry plate process called Etiquette Bleue (Blue Label) which was both reliable and innovative. Within a decade the Lumières were producing 15 million dry photo plates a year. According to author Bertrand Lavédrine:

       "In 1884 the (Lumière) factory had a dozen workers using modern manufacturing machines, often design by Louis himself, not only proficient as a chemist but also a talented design engineer."

      The family company was now one of the largest photographic materials manufacturers in the world.

      Louis Aime Augustin le Prince, the son of a French Army officer, moved from London to New York for business. He had been interested in ‘motion pictures’ for some time and sought out Muybridge’s photographs as reference.

      le Prince used a workshop at his wife’s employer to build a device that had multiple lenses and an electromagnetic shutter.

      Le Prince's ‘Receiver’ used two strips of light-sensitized gelatin exposed through two sets of eight lenses, sequentially triggered by electromagnetic impulses to create a series of images. Glenn Myrent wrote for the New York Times:

       “...le Prince had created what he called a Receiver or single-lens parallax view-finder motion picture camera. It was fashioned from Honduras mahogany and weighed approximately 40 pounds. A light-sensitized strip of paper was advanced between a lens and a shutter by cranking a handle along one side.”

      le Prince applied for a US patent in 1886 and then returned to the family home in Leeds, UK. Despite a lack of flexible film to use in the camera, the Frenchman was able to demonstrate his ‘Receiver’ camera before those who came later, like the Skladanowsky Brothers and Lumières.

      Once his invention was made public, le Prince should have become the father of films. But it was not to be.

      That role was claimed by Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history. Edison (above) was best known for creating the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph but was also famous as a shrewd and tough businessman.

       "Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success."

      Time Magazine later offered a caveat:

       "...although his accomplishments spoke for themselves, Edison was equally prolific, and ambitious, in inventing myths to boost his reputation as a larger-than-life innovator. As a result, his inventions weren’t just scientific discoveries, but also prevarications."

      Edison examined Marey's Chronophotographe device while in Europe, then hosted a visit by Eadweard Muybridge with his Zoopraxiscope at the West Orange labs. Sometime after, Edison directed his young engineer William Kennedy (W.K.) Laurie Dickson in 1887 to produce 'an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear‘.

      Dickson recounted to SMPE:

       "I pointed out to him (Edison) that in the first place I knew of no medium that was sensitive to take micro photographs at so rapid a rate while running continuously on the same shaft."

      Edison

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