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:
In April, Étienne-Jules Marey and assistant Georges Demenÿ had improved their chronophotograph camera used for recording human and animal movement. They debuted the Phonoscope to a small audience at the Académie des Sciences. Marey projected images, of a man speaking words and phrases, that were stored as thumbnails on a glass disk.
Demenÿ was then arguably inspired by the commercial potential of projection shows and wanted to use the Phonoscope to help the deaf learn to speak, with what he called Portraits Parlants or Speaking Portraits. The two men disagreed about future development and split.
Demenÿ set up his own laboratory and designed both a large format projector and a film transport mechanism that could claw filmstrips through a camera in an intermittent fashion or as it was called, 'dog movement'. He unsuccessfully approached the Lumiere brothers for celluloid supplies, and in turn, bought film from the European office of Thomas Blair.
Meanwhile, the man who had created the world’s first movie camera, and movies, disappeared without a trace in September 1890. Louis Aime Augustin le Prince sent his ‘Receiver’ and ‘Deliverer’ devices to New York in preparation for a public demonstration of his ''animated pictures''.
Le Prince spent a weekend with his brother Albert before getting on a train to Paris. The inventor of movie making never arrived. Despite investigations by detectives from three countries, Louis Aime Augustin le Prince, his documents and luggage were not found.
Author Patrick Samuel adds:
"Any hopes he had of being recognized as the true father of the motion picture were lost as he vanished before he was able to patent the new camera in Britain and demonstrate its operation in America."
le Prince’s death had an immediate impact.
By law, nobody could act on his patent for seven years unless le Prince returned or was proven to be deceased. French police were never able to find his body.
From 1890 until 1897, Le Prince's relatives could not legally commercialize his work.
Charles F. Jenkins of Richmond, Indiana was a key player in the invention of moving pictures and he even lived long enough to work on television transmission. As a rural Quaker youth, he invented a bean husker that removed the seed of the bean from the outer shell. Then designed a jack that raised wagons so that grease might be more easily applied.
After graduation, he worked the sawmills of Washington State and then landed a job with the U.S. Life Saving Service, today the U.S. Coast Guard. He used his spare time to design a moving pictures projector and after year of experimentation, he had a working device that screened images. Images that were too small to be viewed by a large audience.
Donald G. Godfrey observed in 'C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television':
"It was challenging for lone inventors to make a living, fund their work, and promote acceptance of a new device, and Jenkins had to meet each of these challenges."
Around this time, May 1891, Mina Edison demonstrated a Kinetoscope unit to the National Federation of Women’s Clubs at her husband Thomas' laboratories. The New York Sun reported:
"In the top of the box was a hole perhaps an inch in diameter. As they looked through the hole they saw the picture of a man. It was a most marvelous picture."
Edison filed patents, began preparations to make film titles for viewing and set the Chicago World Expo 1893 as the debut date.
Meanwhile, Laurie Dickson was still negotiating with local companies to make lenses for the camera and liaising with George Eastman to perfect the celluloid stock. He trimmed the next batch of film from 40 mm (1 9/16 inch) to 34.925 mm (1 3/8 inch) and accidentally created the 35 mm industry standard.
Andre Gaudreault notes in American Cinema:
"A revised version of the camera, called the Kinetograph, was completed in 1892, using film in the modern 35 mm format, a frame one inch wide and three-quarters of an inch high with four perforations on either side to advance the film by engaging sprockets on a wheel."
Dickson filmed everything from circus bears to a staged sneeze by the chief mechanic, Fred Ott. Dickson also created an 'ecosystem of equipment' that included contact printers, developing tanks, drying racks and then constructed a purpose-built outdoor studio, The Black Maria - that rotated on wheels so that it could allow sun in at all times. In the coming fifteen year period, Edison Studios made more than 1200 film titles.
In Germany, two brothers had spent the previous three years traveling a magic lantern show with their father. In the summer of 1892, Max and Emil Skladanowsky built their own chronophotographic camera that used unperforated film in a worm-gear intermittent movement. Max shot forty-eight frames of Emil in August 1892.
As the Germans experimented, it seemed unlikely that the two great American inventors of the era would become further involved in motion pictures. The film pioneer George Eastman believed that his key employees were colluding with a competitor and on New Year's Day 1892 he wrote identical, brief letters to head chemist Henry Reichenbach, his brother Homer, Carl Passavant and Gus Milburn:
"Your services are no longer required by this company".
Eastman stopped film production while he searched for a replacement for Reichenbach. No film stock was available to Edison Labs or anyone else.
At the same time inventor Thomas Edison appears to have been stretched financially by the failing phonograph business and a downturn in the US economy.
Historian Paul Spehr believes that Edison was:
"...uncertain about the long-term market for the Kinetoscope...he was skeptical about what would happen after the novelty wore off."
Frustrated with the lack of progress on the Kinetograph, and Edison's general disinterest, Laurie Dickson spoke to fellow engineer Harry N. Marvin about making a small photographic device that could record, then show: “...just the knockout punch of a prize fight”.
Dickson showed Marvin a prototype pack of cards with sequential images that when flicked, imitated motion. Marvin shared Dickson’s sketches and cards with his friend Herman Casler, with whom both had previously worked with to create the Photoret- “a detective spy camera”.
Casler built a new photo device:
"...for exhibiting consecutively-taken pictures of objects in motion, to which I have applied the name “mutoscope”."
To avoid Edison suing them for patent infringement, the Marvin & Casler Company was then formed to make the Mutoscope for peep shows. At first, Dickson helped Marvin and Casler informally, then the three partners enlisted Elias Koopman, who had helped sell the Photoret, to lead with sales and marketing of the Mutoscope.
The Latham family in New York, who were peepshow exhibitors, were frustrated СКАЧАТЬ