Timeline Analog 1. John Buck
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Название: Timeline Analog 1
Автор: John Buck
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Серия: Timeline Analog
isbn: 9781925108347
isbn:
The Latham's reached out to Laurie Dickson for advice.
Meanwhile, Charles Jenkins had built a 'better Kinetoscope', in his spare time, which he said was for:
'...the recording and reproduction of action'
Friends, fellow-boarders, and colleagues across Washington D.C. tested and trialed the device. Some even posed for Jenkins so he could photograph their diving, swimming and jumping actions. Jenkins wrote to the legendary inventor Alexander Graham Bell to seek funding for the device that he called Phenakistascope. Bell saw an immediate application for the device beyond cinema audiences - to create photographs of talking lips to assist in teaching the deaf. Bell encouraged Jenkins to continue with his 'simply ingenious mechanism'.
Jenkins then landed James Freeman as an investor/engineer and the two men started work on a new projection device, called the Phantoscope - a name used for all future devices. Jenkins believed that a consistent brand was a key element in his future success.
Around the same time, Ottomar Anschütz showed his Electrotachyscope, which presented the illusion of motion using serial photographs arranged on a spinning wheel, much like Dickson's pack of cards prototype, at the Chicago World's Fair. The device made an impression on Thomas Armat, a young man in the audience who was determined to become an inventor.
Armat soon teamed up with Jenkins in business.
After years of delays, Kinetoscopes began to appear around the world, first at the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, New York then in Mexico and Stockholm. Five machines were bought by the MacMahon brothers screened films at the Haunted Swing Premises on Bourke Street in Melbourne, Australia.
In Europe, pioneering brothers pursued their visions.
Emil and Max Skladanowsky (above) progressed from making a basic film camera to a projector called the Bioskop that used two loops of 54mm film, one frame being projected alternately from each. This made it possible for the Bioscop to project at 16 frames per second, a speed sufficient to create the illusion of movement. The brothers worked through 1893 and 1894 making films to project.
It became apparent during that Thomas Edison had made a business mistake. He had not patented the Kinetoscope outside the US, which allowed anyone to make their own 35 mm viewer and cameras without fear of litigation. When Charles-Antoine Lumière met with his son Louis, and company engineer Eugene Moisson in 1894, he was holding a sample of film that he had received from an Edison Studios agent.
'This is what you should make because Edison sells it at insane prices."
The opportunity was two-fold. To build a 35 mm camera to shoot films and a 35 mm projector to screen them. An accomplished engineer in his own right, Louis Lumière visited fellow Parisian inventor Georges Demenÿ at the Villa Chaptal and viewed the devices he had produced.
Demenÿ had designed an intermittent projection method using a pair of claws, and a large projector apparatus but Lumière decided not to engage with him.
The paper based film stock that Lumière used for his prototype was not robust enough for his machinery nor sufficient for exposure, so he reached out to the Hyatt's Celluloid Company for celluloid roll film. When their base stock did not work, Lumiere tried samples from Eastman-Kodak and Thomas Blair.
Reliable, robust flexible film was still a problem that needed solving before motion pictures could advance.
After Edison's Kinetoscope was officially launched in London, two London film exhibitors approached Robert W. Paul, an electrical engineer, to exploit the patent loop-hole and make a 'Kinetoscope-clone'. They had six genuine Edison machines but needed six more to satisfy audience demand.
Paul had a local manufacture reverse-engineer the Kinetoscope and build replicas, called Theatrographs. Then Paul discovered that his clients had no films to project because Edison controlled the market by only supplying films to operators of authentic machines. He needed a filmmaker.
A friend introduced him to Birt Acres, the English photographer, and inventor, who seemed to be an ideal candidate. Already a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Acres had devised a lantern slide system that could project a series of photographs in sequence creating the impression of motion. The two men agreed to make several short film titles.
In Paris, Charles Pathé had been successful in selling Edison's phonograph devices when he too realized that the US inventor had failed to patent his projection machines in Europe. Pathé bought several Kinetoscope-clones from Robert Paul, then looked for an engineer to build 35 mm cameras that he could use to make film titles.
Henri Joly had performed as a gymnast before Demenÿ's Phonoscope cameras and then persisted with his interest in engineering and photography. He met Pathé and convinced him that he could build a 35 mm camera.
Meanwhile, the American inventor Charles Jenkins had refined his imaging device so that it was able to project a larger image to an audience. He set up the Phantoscope (below) in June 1894 for an audience that included his parents, friends, and reporters from The Photographic Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Richmond Telegram who wrote:
"As the last arc ceased to sputter and the window-shades rolled up, the people began to ask one another what they had seen. It was not certainly clear.
Although there had been the gesticulating girl ... from where had she come? How did she move? The viewers went behind the screen to impress the wall and ascertain there was no trickery, for there were no words to express it.”
Jenkins biographer Donald Godfrey:
"The film began rolling and life-sized images appeared depicting a dancing girl dressed in a butterfly costume. She danced across the screen to the amazement of the audience. As the ballerina lifted her skirt, to bow at the end of the performance, she revealed her ankle, and the ladies in the audience, all Quakers, stormed out of the store in protest over such a display of nudity. They went directly to the Church to pray for Jenkins soul. The men in the audience stayed on to see the show."
Jenkins returned to Washington and made a demonstration at the Pure Foods Seminar, screening life-size images onto a twenty-foot screen. He then filed the Phantoscope projector patent and completed work on his Kinetographic rotary-lens camera which would be used in concert to record motion pictures. Jenkins continued in his government job and attended the Bliss Electrical School at night in search of a way to solve the illumination problems he encountered with the Phantoscope.
He formed a fateful partnership with a fellow Bliss student, Thomas Armat. The two entrepreneurs decided to work together on the Phantoscope - for a period of fifteen years.
In late 1894, Thomas Edison discovered his protégé Laurie Dickson had assisted the Lathams to build their own peepshow projector and the young engineer soon left his employ. Dickson joined with Elias Koopman, Harry Marvin, and Herman Casler to form the K.M.C.D. syndicate. It made the cast-iron ornate Mutoscope machines which gave viewers the illusion of motion by showing flip-cards advanced by a hand СКАЧАТЬ