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:
"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 reportedly replied
"We'll try it and it will lead to other things."
Over the next five years, Laurie Dickson worked to create the Kinetograph to record images and the Kinetoscope to screen them. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey notes:
"While Edison provided the resources, the vision for the invention, and the electromechanical knowledge used in designing motion picture devices, Dickson provided most of the knowledge of photography that those inventions drew on."
The scene was set for another decade of experimentation, legal disputes, patent fights, mysterious deaths and corporate bullying.
Roll-film patent holder David Houston arrived at George Eastman's office in Rochester. He was unhappy with the original license fees that Kodak had paid, and eventually settled with Eastman to 'buy him out root and branch' for $75,000 ($2m in today's terms). Eastman then paid out textile baron Darius Goff, who owned the patent for perforated film stock and acquired Samuel Turner's daylight-loading patent.
Film historian Mark Cousins describes the invention of filmmaking as:
"...a shambolic race."
In October 1888, Louis Aime Augustin le Prince set up his ‘Receiver’ camera in the backyard of a family home in Roundhay, Leeds. He loaded it with non-perforated film and directed his 'subjects' to walk in a circle. The images that he recorded survive as the Roundhay Garden Scene. The first moving picture made. le Prince spent the winter months building his ‘Deliverer’ projector with three lenses and three belts.
Photographic milestones and inventions began to overlap and leapfrog each other in quick succession. By 1882 Étienne Jules Marey had created a revolving disc camera with glass plates. He showed 40 sequential images at the Academie des Sciences in Paris:
"This method enables me to obtain the successive impressions of a man or of an animal in motion while avoiding the necessity of operating in front of a black background."
Fellow Frenchman Charles-Emile Reynaud built another way to screen images to an audience.
He took a child’s toy called the Praxinoscope and with modification turned it into a public projection system. The Théâtre Optique (below) is significant. Film historian Deac Rossell states its importance in the timeline of invention:
"...a significant and successful example of a moving picture apparatus using a continuously-running image band and an optical intermittent system"
After a decade manufacturing and selling glass photo plates, John Carbutt decided to experiment and reached out to the Hyatt’s Celluloid Manufacturing Company.
He СКАЧАТЬ