In order to reach the likely beginning of attempts to capture moving images, we must go back to 1825. British physicist Peter Roget then drew attention to the optical illusion of the movement of a wheel behind and along a fence made of vertical rails. A few years later, Michael Faraday, also a British physicist, described a series of optical illusions that resulted in the appearance of motion. Thus, a broader discussion of a new kind of psychological experience has opened up.
The need to capture movement is the mother of cinematographic invention
In 1832, acting independently of each other, the inventor Simon von Stampfer in Germany and the physicist Joseph Plateau in France created a device that made it possible to convey the impression of the continuous movement of given objects. They both had exactly the same idea – they made thin holes in the black disk and then set the whole thing in motion, during which the cracks passed right in front of the observer’s eye. By placing the disc in front of the mirror and specific images behind the slots, e.g. a wheel with spokes in different positions, one could see their succession, imitating driving.
Despite the similarity of ideas, each of the inventors named his work differently. Stampfer made a strobe disc and Plateau made a phenakistoscope. Twenty years later, Franz von Uchatius, an Austro-Hungarian army marshal and inventor, used a strobe disc to create a device for projecting projected images onto any surface, and British mathematician William Horner converted the disc into a drum with strips of paper, later called a zootrope or bioscope.
In 1872, the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, as an experiment, captured the subsequent stages of the horse’s trot. In his research work, they were later used by the French physiologist Marey Étienne Jules, analyzing, for example, the movement of birds’ wings. An undoubted breakthrough was the replacement of the material used for capturing photos – instead of glass plates, attempts were made to implement transparent paper, gelatin or celluloid. Eventually, Eastman began producing a film that would serve for decades to come.
When it comes to learning, it’s also fun
The slowly emerging cinema served not only education, but also entertainment. All thanks to the so-called camera obscura, the prototype of which was used, for example, by Leonardo da Vinci in determining the perspective, or for Nicolaus Copernicus in observing a solar eclipse. The rays of light falling into the dark box through the opening, acting as a lens, created an inverted and reduced image on the frosted glass – the first photograph immortalized in this way on a metal plate was taken in 1826 or 1827.
Years later, in 1890, Thomas Edison constructed and patented the kinetoscope – the first device that could display and view moving images. The strip of celluloid film containing the photos moved through a series of rollers past the magnifying lens. The kinetoscope was not showing a movie, but a series of photos in succession imitating actual movement. The device resembled a small wardrobe and was intended for one viewer only. Edison’s invention was presented to a wider audience at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and took the whole world by storm.
The kinetoscope fascinated the French inventors, the Lumière brothers, to such an extent that immediately after purchasing the device, they began to work on improving it. Their main goal was to make it possible to present the displayed image to a greater number of recipients. At the beginning of 1895, the brothers constructed and patented a cinematograph that was lighter than the original (it weighed 4 kg, and the Edison kinetoscope almost 500 kg). The movement of the belt was driven by a crank moved by the operator, so that heavy batteries of the kinetoscope could be dispensed with.
Forgotten Polish film thought
A few months later, on December 28, they managed to organize the first public film screening using a cinematograph. At the Indian Salon, located in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, they showed a video of workers leaving a factory in Lyon to an audience of 35 people. It lasted 45 seconds and is considered the first public movie in the history of cinematography.
The resulting films mainly depicted the everyday life of the French, but also inspired filmmakers such as Georges Mélies, who is considered a pioneer of feature cinema and creator of special effects film. Despite the construction and patenting of the cinematograph, the Lumiere brothers were not the inventors of this device – Ottomar Anschütz, a German inventor from Leszno, built a prototype of the cinematograph in 1886. Two years later, he opened a special room in the Wrocław zoo where he could photograph live animals.
The kinetoscope, and later the cinematograph, enjoyed fame, overshadowing our native invention – the pleograph, created by Kazimierz Prószyński in 1894. It was a camera that allowed simultaneous recording and playback of the recording. A few years later, its improved version was created – a biopleograph, which eliminated vibrations and skips of the film. Another revolutionary invention of Prószyński was the aeroscope, i.e. the first manual camera with automatic drive, used, among others, by to record activities during the First World War. Auguste Lumiere himself recalled the designer:
I was, together with my brother, the creator of a French film, but there was also a Pole, a certain Kazimierz Prószyński, who was much ahead of us.
Source: Gazeta
Tristin is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.
