THE FIRST ATTEMPTS TO PRODUCE MOVING PICTURES
The idea of producing apparent animation by means of pictures is by
no means new. The origin of the most primitive form of moving picture
device is lost in the mists of antiquity; but it is certain that long
before photography was conceived animated pictures were in vogue, and
constituted a source of infinite amusement among children. The illusion
was secured by a simple device known as the Zoetrope or the “Wheel of
Life.” It consists of a small cylinder, mounted on a vertical spindle
in such a way that it is free to revolve horizontally. A band of thin
cardboard, or thick paper, on which is painted a series of pictures,
generally in colour, depicting successive stages in a particular
movement, such as a horse jumping, a child swinging, or two youngsters
playing see-saw, is placed horizontally around the inside of the lower
half of the cylinder. The upper half is pierced at regular intervals
by long narrow slits or vertical openings, which come opposite the
pictures and extend only about half-way down the length of the wall.
When the cylinder is rotated sharply and one looks through the slits,
the pictures portray apparent motion--the horse rises and falls in the
jump, the swing moves to and fro, and the see-saw goes up and down--in
accordance with the laws of visual persistence.
Each successive picture, it must be pointed out, is interrupted by the
space in the surface of the wall between two consecutive slits through
which one peeps into the cylinder. We have, in fact, a cinematograph in
the most primitive form; the space between the apertures corresponding
to the opaque sector of the shutter of the camera and the projector,
whereby one picture is eclipsed from view on the screen to permit the
next to be brought before the lens. Indeed, one can easily convert the
zoetrope into a cinematograph if, instead of painted pictures, prints
of a cinematograph film are mounted in the same way. As a matter of
fact, some ingenious person followed this practice years ago, thus
unconsciously producing the first animated pictures by photography, and
in a crude way anticipating the kinetoscope.
From time to time the zoetrope was modified and revived in the
praxinoscope, phenakistoscope, zoopraxinoscope, and a number of other
forms with awe-inspiring names. In every instance, however, it was
merely our old friend in a new guise. One of these modifications
created a flutter of excitement in France in 1877. It was called the
“praxinoscope,” and its creator, M. Reynaud, for the first time enabled
a large audience to see animation upon the screen.
In this case projection was carried out in a highly novel manner.
The front, or proscenium opening, of the stage was occupied by a
large white screen, such as is used for magic lantern projection, the
operator and his apparatus being on the stage behind, out of sight.
Accordingly the audience saw the picture through the sheet. At the back
of the stage a limelight lantern was set up, from which a still life
picture was thrown, filling the greater part of the surface of the
screen. The picture thus shown formed as it were the setting for the
animated picture, in just the same way as the scenery comprises the
environment for a stage play.
Below the level of the stage was a large rectangular table, at each
corner of which were placed small vertical rollers. At one end of the
table were two large spools, fitted with handles which were revolved
horizontally. One spool carried a long band of transparent material, on
which were painted at regular intervals silhouette figures in colour in
successive stages of movement. The band led from this spool round the
vertical roller immediately adjacent, then along the side of the table
to the next corner, on to the next corner, on to the third corner,
back to the fourth corner, and then to the empty reel, on which it was
wound. By simultaneously rotating the loaded spool with the left hand,
and the second reel with the right hand, the transparent picture band
was passed round the table from one spool to the other.
Centrally with the sheet, and on a level with the table, there was a
second limelight lantern, the back of which was towards the audience.
This lantern threw its rays upward at an angle of forty-five degrees
or so. As the band of pictures travelled along the table edge from the
first to the second corner roller, it was passed through this second
lantern, which projected the silhouette picture into a mirror hung
overhead at the back of the stage, which in turn reflected the image
on the screen. The figures on the band thrown from the second lantern
appeared in the scene of the slide shown by the first lantern. As the
band was moved forward, bringing successive phases of action upon the
screen, apparent motion was produced. In fact, animated pictures were
shown, and it was possible with a number of spools of painted bands to
produce a comedy, tragedy, or other stage play in pictures. This crude
apparatus was the first attempt to portray moving pictures upon a sheet
before a large audience.
As instantaneous photography developed and efforts were made to adapt
photographic records instead of painted pictures to the praxinoscope,
great difficulty was experienced in securing the consecutive pictures
sufficiently close to one another so as to reduce the loss of action
between two successive pictures to the minimum. The cameras available
were not suited to this work. Too much time was lost in removing the
exposed sensitised surface to permit another unexposed area to be
brought before the lens.
About 1872 Mr. Muybridge, an ingenious Englishman, resident in San
Francisco, conceived a novel means of obtaining snap-shot photographs
in rapid succession. He maintained that such photographs taken at
regular intervals, reproduced in such a manner as to simulate natural
animation, would reveal the peculiar attitudes of animals in motion and
would prove of invaluable service to artists. He approached Governor
Stanford and unfolded his scheme. Stanford was so impressed that he
placed every facility at Muybridge’s disposal for the completion of
the experiment, including the use of his valuable stud of horses and
exercising track.
As it was impossible to secure the desired end with a single camera,
Muybridge built a studio beside the track, in which twenty-four cameras
were placed side by side in a row. On the opposite side of the track,
facing the studio, he erected a high fence, painted white, while across
the track between the studio and the screen twenty-four threads were
stretched, each of which was connected with a powerful spring, which
held in position the shutter of a camera.
When all was ready, a horse was driven over this length of track at a
canter, gallop, trot, or walk, as desired, and as the animal passed
each camera, it broke the thread controlling its shutter, so that
the horse photographed itself in its progress. In these experiments,
however, Muybridge made no effort to secure detail. The photographs
were taken in brilliant sunlight, and the white screen threw a dazzling
reflection, causing the objects to stand out in bold relief, so that
the record appeared in silhouette. As these photographs were taken for
a specific purpose--the analysis of movement--the screen was subdivided
into panels, whereby it was possible to determine the distance between
each successive picture. (Fig. 1.)
[Illustration:
[_By Permission of “The Scientific American.”_
FIG. 1.--THE FIRST MOVING PICTURES.
Twelve successive photographs, by Mr. Muybridge, of a horse in full
gallop. In the last figure the horse is seen standing still. The speed
of the horse was about 1,142 metres (3,746 feet) per minute.]
As Muybridge’s experiments were carried out upon a somewhat private
basis, the information about them that reached Europe was of a
very meagre description. In France, however, they aroused a strong
curiosity and peculiar interest, especially in artistic and scientific
circles. They appealed especially to one man--Meissonier. The great
artist, whose accuracy in the most minute detail was proverbial, was
fascinated. He had observed very closely the curious attitudes that
horses assume when in rapid motion, and had committed the observations
to his canvases, only to meet with strenuous hostile criticism
from his colleagues and the public. So when Governor Stanford, while
visiting Paris, displayed some of Muybridge’s photographs, the great
painter spent hours in studying them, and characterised them as an
incalculable aid to art. Through Governor Stanford, he extended an
invitation to Muybridge.
In the following year the Anglo-American experimenter--who might be
described as the father of animated photography--visited the French
capital, and received a warm greeting by Meissonier. The artist
had been criticised for his views concerning muscular action, as
displayed by the animals on his canvases, yet here was a man who could
demonstrate, by the conclusive evidence of photography, that his views
were correct. Meissonier arranged a private demonstration, which ranked
as one of the most important social events of the year in Paris. Among
those who accepted the invitation to witness the new wonder were
Gerome, Goupil, Steinheil, Detaillé, Alexander Dumas, and Dr. Mallez.
Muybridge had brought a representative collection of photographs with
him, showing horses in movement, dogs, deer, and other animals running
and jumping, as well as men wrestling, leaping, and performing other
athletic exercises.
The pictures were examined at great length individually. Then by means
of the zoopraxoscope, a form of the wheel of life, whereby pictures
in action could be thrown upon the screen, they were displayed in
animation, thereby conclusively demonstrating the fact that what
appeared so incredibly singular an attitude in a painting or an
individual photograph was in reality part of a graceful harmonious
natural movement.
There was one feature of Muybridge’s work which must not be overlooked,
and which decidedly restricted its application. A battery of cameras
had to be employed, placed side by side. It was as if a number of
photographers, standing in a row, pressed a button the instant the
object in motion was opposite their respective cameras. All the
photographs were broadside views, and taken from the same relative
position. The results were not as the following eye of one person
saw them, but as the eyes of twenty or thirty persons standing side
by side grasped a glimpse of motion during the five-thousandth part
of a second. If Muybridge had attempted to take 900 photographic
impressions, such as the cinematograph camera records in the space of
a minute to-day, he would have required nine hundred cameras for the
purpose.
Of course, such a plan had no commercial possibilities. Its real
value lay in the fact that it stimulated the ingenuity of a host of
inventive brains towards the solution of animated photography. One
and all were bent upon securing the same result that Muybridge had
achieved, but with a single camera and from one point of view. Among
these experimenters the names of Greene and Evans, Acres and Paul stand
pre-eminent in Great Britain, while France and the United States had an
equal number of contemporaneous investigators engaged upon the problem.
Even Muybridge himself attempted its solution, for he realised only
too well that a battery of cameras was impracticable to ensure the
commercial success of animated photography.
It appears to be a sorry trick of fortune that every great invention,
or development, should produce a bevy of claimants for the honour
of being the “original inventor.” The word “original” is somewhat
obscure and ambiguous, but it is employed frequently. As a matter of
fact, it is a wise invention that can single out its creator. Animated
photography has been no exception to the rule. Lawyers and the courts
have reaped a rich harvest from protracted litigation in the effort to
settle the question once and for all, with the inevitable result--the
law has left the matter in a more hazy condition than ever.
The claim to the discovery of animated photography can scarcely be
sustained by any one man. Desvignes devised an apparatus in 1860; Du
Mont formulated the first tangible scheme of chronophotography, as
it is called, in 1861, which Donisthorpe put into practice in 1876,
while a host of other experimenters contributed to the problem in some
particular detail. It was not invention, for the simple reason
that there was nothing to invent; it was merely evolution and the
perfection of details. As we have seen, what the experimenters had to
accomplish was the reduction of the length of time occupied in bringing
one sensitised surface before the lens after the preceding sensitised
surface had been exposed. This was a matter of mechanical detail,
for the chemist accelerated the speed of the sensitised surface more
and more, and finally evolved the celluloid film. Various means of
bringing successive sections of a sensitised surface before the lens
were evolved, and produced a plethora of patents; but the perfection
of details does not affect the fundamental principle of animated
photography. In Great Britain many investigators were energetic in the
quest, but the great majority never succeeded beyond the model stage;
that is to say, their apparatuses never possessed any practical value,
and only served to emphasise once more the truth of the well-worn axiom
that there is a great gulf between the creative mind of the inventor
and the commercial world with its enormous capacity for development and
exploitation.
Among the early British experimenters was W. F. Greene, who, like
others, was handicapped by having to make use of glass plates. In
1885 he displayed his first apparatus for taking and producing moving
pictures, and two years later exhibited some pictures taken on glass
in the window of his premises in Piccadilly. This unusual display
created such interest, and the curiosity-provoked public so crowded the
pavement that traffic was impeded, and the police called upon Greene to
remove his pictures.
In France even greater things were being accomplished. Dr. E. J.
Marey took up Muybridge’s work at the point where the Anglo-American
abandoned it. Marey followed rather the lines laid down by the
astronomical investigator Jansen, who in 1874 evolved a photographic
revolver to secure records at short intervals of the transit of Venus
across the sun’s disc. Marey constructed a photographic gun in 1882,
with which he studied the flight of birds, and which worked on the
principle elaborated by Jansen eight years before. The object of his
quest was the analysis of motion. It will be seen, therefore, that
in its very earliest stages the value of animated photography was
conceded to be rather in the field of science than that of amusement.
This celebrated French experimenter realised the inestimable value
of “chronophotography” for the study and investigation of moving
bodies, the rapidity in the changes of the position or form of which
was impossible to follow otherwise. Marey, however, made no effort
towards synthesis or reproduction of the motion thus obtained; he did
not seek projection upon a huge scale upon the screen, but regarded
chronophotography rather as a means of enabling photographic results to
be resolved into diagrams for examining and elucidating obscure points
incidental to motion.
[Illustration: DR. E. J. MAREY’s FAMOUS EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMATOGRAPHY.
1. Photographic gun of 1882, to photograph birds in flight. 2.
Consecutive pictures of a gull flying, taken with the photographic gun.
3. Chronophotographic apparatus for taking consecutive pictures upon a
single glass plate, showing mechanism.]
[Illustration: DR. MAREY’S ANIMATED PICTURES MADE IN 1884–86 FOR THE
ANALYSIS OF MOTION.
1. A man jumping. 2. A man walking. 3. A duck flying. 4. A man leaping.
The objects, clothed in white, passed before a black screen, and the
exposures averaged about 1/200 of a second.]
Special apparatus was evolved and was set up at the Physiological
Station in Paris, and some wonderful results were communicated by this
industrious scientist to the French Association for the Advancement of
Science at Nancy in 1886. Investigations were being carried out upon
a large and advanced scale in France while the English were merely
dabbling with the idea. Marey secured records of action intermittently
from a single point of view by the revolution of a handle, and to a
pronounced degree anticipated the present-day cinematograph.
Marey’s camera was successful in its details, especially considering
the extreme difficulties attending the use of glass plates. He
ascertained that in order to secure continuous motion it was imperative
to cut off the light from the plate at regular intervals; and he
accomplished this interruption by rotating an opaque disc, pierced with
small radial slots, which permitted the light to reach the plate only
intermittently. The general design of Marey’s camera is shown in Fig.
2. The camera, of the ordinary bellows type, was mounted in the upper
part of a wooden frame clamped to a special support. Beneath was the
handle, which rotated the shutter through gearing. This shutter moved
at the back of the bellows, occupying the same position relatively as
the focal plane shutter used in very rapid still-life instantaneous
photography. By means of this shutter, the passage of a body across
the field of the lens was split up into a number of consecutive units.
The interval between two successive images, and the time of the
exposure, could be altered merely by varying the revolving speed of
the shutter. As a rule, the exposures were made at the rate of ten per
second, but in some cases the length of the exposure was only 1/2,000th
part of a second, with an interval of one-fifth second between two
consecutive pictures. Marey used a black background, and his figures
were clothed in white.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--MAREY’S CAMERA, SHOWING SHUTTER WITH RADIAL
SLOTS.]
There was an important reason for this reversal of Muybridge’s
procedure. In the latter the shutter of each camera had to be opened
as the horse or other object passed the lens. In Marey’s system the
sensitised surface of the plate is directed against a dead black
screen, and the lens may be left open without exercising any ill
effect upon the photographic plate, because the latter receives no
light. When a man clothed in white passed across this black surface
in full sunlight, only his figure was recorded upon the sensitised
surface, and thus was thrown in strong relief against the black
background.
Special arrangements, however, had to be made to ensure the success of
the result. A flat plane black background did not suffice, as a certain
amount of light was reflected therefrom into the lens, resulting in
the plate becoming fogged. The black screen employed was in reality a
black cavity, known as “Chevreul’s black.” The cavity may be likened
to a shed, the front wall of which is removed, and the whole interior
blackened. In the screen used by Marey at the Physiological Station in
Paris, the back of the shed was hung with black velvet, the floor was
covered with pitch, while the sides and ceiling were treated with a
dead black medium.
These arrangements enabled Marey to secure more useful results than
were possible to Muybridge. From the scientific point of view they
proved of incalculable value. His marvellous pictures widened our
knowledge of animal motion to a remarkable extent, and provided
incontrovertible records of action. Professor Marey ultimately recorded
the sum of his experiments in a volume, _Movement_, which is now
regarded universally as a classic in physiological science, and even
to-day is consulted freely for the purpose of elucidating complex and
obscure phases of motion.
Other investigators at about this time were General Sebert, M. L. Soret
of Geneva, and Ottomar Anschütz of Berlin. Soret succeeded in analysing
some very intricate movements, while Anschütz produced a curious “wheel
of life,” which was called the “electrical tachyscope.” A special
camera was evolved whereby photographs were taken in rapid succession.
From these negatives glass transparencies similar to lantern slides
were produced, and mounted in sequence around the rim of a large wheel,
which had to be of sufficient diameter to contain the whole series
of pictures. It was mounted upon a massive iron pedestal, and was
revolved from the rear by means of a handle.
Behind the wheel, and at the highest point, which corresponded to the
level of the eyes of the average person while standing, a small box
was placed. The front of this box was open, the size of this aperture
corresponding exactly to the dimensions of the transparency. It was
fitted with a small electric light--a Geissler tube, in fact, through
which a current was passed from a Rhumkorff coil--and this light was
switched on and off by each picture as it passed before the front of
the lamp box. As each picture came into position before the aperture a
contact was established, and an impulse of electricity was discharged
through the lamp. It was a mere flash, but it served to illuminate the
transparency immediately in front, so that the people gazing at the
wheel received a brilliant and well-defined impression of the picture,
which was shown in an apparently stationary position, though, in fact,
the wheel was revolving continuously. When the wheel was rotated with
sufficient speed, the flashes occurred in such rapid sequence that, in
accordance with the phenomena of visual persistence, the illusion of
animation was secured.
This was an extremely ingenious apparatus, but was too complicated,
expensive, and elaborate to command any commercial value. It was
regarded generally as a scientific toy. It was on view in London,
in the Strand near Chancery Lane, for a little while, but failed to
arouse very marked enthusiasm. However, the “inventor’s fiddle,” as the
Anschütz tachyscope was popularly called, was adopted by several other
inventors with certain modifications, but its application was naturally
extremely limited. Comparatively speaking, only a very few pictures
could be carried in the rim of the wheel, and as the travelling
speed was somewhat high in order to convey a tangible impression of
continuous motion, a subject was exhausted in a few seconds.
Associated with Dr. Marey in his experiments was another indefatigable
spirit, M. Georges Demeny. He displayed considerable ingenuity in
breaking down the peculiar difficulties associated with this work.
Unfortunately the value of M. Demeny’s efforts have never been
appreciated; but he brought his mind to bear upon the subject at a
critical period, and devoted all his energies, time, and thought
to the solution of complicated problems that defied contemporary
experimenters. He proved an indispensable colleague to Professor Marey,
which the author of _Movement_ did not fail to acknowledge. So far as
France is concerned, he rightly deserves to be regarded as the pioneer
in cinematography. He not only photographed motion, but he reproduced
it upon the screen, and devised an ingenious camera and projector to
achieve his end.
M. Georges Demeny was forestalled in Great Britain by Messrs. Greene
and Evans, who produced a chronophotographic apparatus which they
patented in June, 1889, wherein the film was drawn intermittently
before the lens for exposure. Two months previously, in April, 1889,
another inventor, Stern, had filed a patent also, and these constitute
the first intimation at the British Patent Office of the pending
developments in cinematography. Neither issued beyond the experimental
and model stage, for the simple reason that they were not reliable in
their operation. There was no satisfactory mechanical means for moving
the sensitised surfaces forward an equal distance after each exposure,
and this omission of an indispensable feature proved fatal to their
success.