Motion Pictures - 4

Motion Pictures - 4

 One of these early exhibitions is described in the Scientific American of June 5, 1880:

"While the separate photographs had shown the successive positions of a trotting or

running horse in making a single stride, the Zoogyroscope threw upon the screen

apparently the living animal. Nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the turf,

and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils, to make the spectator believe that he

had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds. In the views of hurdle-leaping, the

simulation was still more admirable, even to the motion of the tail as the animal gathered

for the jump, the raising of his head, all were there. Views of an ox trotting, a wild bull

on the charge, greyhounds and deer running and birds flying in mid- air were shown, also

athletes in various positions." It must not be assumed from this statement that even as late

as the work of Muybridge anything like a true illusion of movement had been obtained,

because such was not the case. Muybridge secured only one cycle of movement, because

a separate camera had to be used for each photograph and consequently each cycle was

reproduced over and over again. To have made photographs of a trotting- horse for one

minute at the moderate rate of twelve per second would have required, under the

Muybridge scheme, seven hundred and twenty separate cameras, whereas with the

modern art only a single camera is used. A further defect with the Muybridge pictures

was that since each photograph was secured when the moving object was in the centre of

the plate, the reproduction showed the object always centrally on the screen with its arms

or legs in violent movement, but not making any progress, and with the scenery rushing

wildly across the field of view!

In the early 80's the dry plate was first introduced into general use, and from that time

onward its rapidity and quality were gradually improved; so much so that after 1882 Prof.

E. J. Marey, of the French Academy, who in 1874 had published a well-known treatise on

"Animal Movement," was able by the use of dry plates to carry forward the experiments

of Muybridge on a greatly refined scale. Marey was, however, handicapped by reason of

the fact that glass plates were still used, although he was able with a single camera to

obtain twelve photographs on successive plates in the space of one second. Marey, like

Muybridge, photographed only one cycle of the movements of a single object, which was

subsequently reproduced over and over again, and the camera was in the form of a gun,

which could follow the object so that the successive pictures would be always located in

the centre of the plates.

The review above given, as briefly as possible, comprises substantially the sum of the

world's knowledge at the time the problem of recording and reproducing animate

movement was first undertaken by Edison. The most that could be said of the condition

of the art when Edison entered the field was that it had been recognized that if a series of

instantaneous photographs of a moving object could be secured at an enormously high

rate many times per second--they might be passed before the eye either directly or by

projection upon a screen, and thereby result in a reproduction of the movements. Two

very serious difficulties lay in the way of actual accomplishment, however--first, the

production of a sensitive surface in such form and weight as to be capable of being

successively brought into position and exposed, at the necessarily high rate; and, second,

the production of a camera capable of so taking the pictures. There were numerous other

workers in the field, but they added nothing to what had already been proposed. Edison

himself knew nothing of Ducos, or that the suggestions had advanced beyond the single

centrally located photographs of Muybridge and Marey. As a matter of public policy, the

law presumes that an inventor must be familiar with all that has gone before in the field

within which he is working, and if a suggestion is limited to a patent granted in New

South Wales, or is described in a single publication in Brazil, an inventor in America,

engaged in the same field of thought, is by legal fiction presumed to have knowledge not

only of the existence of that patent or publication, but of its contents. We say this not in

the way of an apology for the extent of Edison's contribution to the motion-picture art,

because there can be no question that he was as much the creator of that art as he was of

the phonographic art; but to show that in a practical sense the suggestion of the art itself

was original with him. He himself says: "In the year 1887 the idea occurred to me that it

was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph

does for the ear, and that by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be

recorded and reproduced simultaneously. This idea, the germ of which came from the

little toy called the Zoetrope and the work of Muybridge, Marey, and others, has now

been accomplished, so that every change of facial expression can be recorded and

reproduced life- size. The kinetoscope is only a small model illustrating the present stage

of the progress, but with each succeeding month new possibilities are brought into view. I

believe that in coming years, by my own work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marey,

and others who will doubtless enter the field, grand opera can be given at the

Metropolitan Opera House at New York without any material change from the original,

and with artists and musicians long since dead."