Timeline Analog 1. John Buck

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      Innovation was a measure of national stature. During the late-nineteenth century devices like the electric furnace, the steam turbine, the automobile, wireless telegraphy, and the aircraft were invented.

      Historians call it the 'golden age of invention'.

      Author Peter Kobel notes:

       "Something was certainly in the air. The turn of the century was a period of tremendous technological development, firing imaginations with visions of speed."

      The English philosopher, Alfred Whitehead wrote:

       "The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention."

      Sir John Herschel, the son of respected British astronomer William Herschel, epitomized Whitehead's observation.

      Kshitij Nagar described Herschel as:

       "...the scientific superstar of the 19th century."

      Herschel was a chemist and botanist when he started in an emerging field that the Scientific American (1862) called:

       "Of all the arts, the one that seems miraculous is photography."

      Writer Helmut Gernsheim concluded:

       "Photography owes Herschel many valuable contributions..."

      Even though the science, art, application, and practice of photography was invented cumulatively, Herschel is arguably the 'Father of Photography'. In rapid succession, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate stabilized a developed photograph and he then made the earliest extant photograph to glass. He even took time to clarify the words used by his peers to describe their work in patents and academic papers. Herschel coined the term photography as a more precise description and was the first to use the terms negative, positive and snapshot.

      Among many ideas that he set forward was a device that could project a program of sequential images. Moving Pictures.

       "What I have to propose may appear a dream, but it has at least the merit of being possible, and perhaps a realisable one...by an adequate sacrifice of time, trouble, mechanism and outlay."

      He believed there were two major steps to make.

       "1st..what photography has already realised, or we may be sure it will realise within some very limited lapse of time...and, 2ndly, that a mechanism is possible by which a prepared plate be presented, focussed, impressed, displaced, numbered, secured in the dark, and replaced by another within two or three tenths of a second."

      Such an apparatus needed speed and flexibility, and the technology of nineteenth-century photography was neither. It was too rigid and too slow to rapidly expose a series of images. Let alone project them to an audience.

      A key inventor in later years, Charles Francis Jenkins, recalls how many steps were actually needed:

       "The motion picture is not a sort of Minerva-birth of inventive genius but like all notable achievements in mechanisms has had a long line of predecessors, for the difficult problem of recording and reproducing motion did not yield without much preliminary fumbling."

      Jenkins was right.