Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures

During the period between the time Edison achieved his first success with motion pictures, in 1889, until his peep-show viewing machines were put on public display in New York, Paris and London in 1894, hesitant, unsteady steps, like those of a baby learning to walk, were being taken in advancing the magic shadow art-science.

Progress was made in England under Wordsworth Donisthorpe, an interesting character named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, three associates, Greene, Rudge and Evans, and others. In France, there were Marey and Demeny, with Marey developing what was probably the first real motion picture projector capable of projecting more than one short scene—the limitation of all disk models though it was only intended for laboratory use; and Reynaud with the first popular motion picture theatre which, however, did not use photographic pictures. In Germany, Anschütz, inventor of the Tachyscope, was working on a projector, as were others on both sides of the Atlantic.

Donisthorpe, with the help of W. C. Croft, whom he later described as “a good draughtsman” but not a person skilled in optics, constructed about 1889 a Kinesigraph which Donisthorpe had originally suggested in 1877, at the time he wrote concerning Edison’s phonograph and a plan to combine it with a motion picture machine. Describing the circumstances in a letter to the British Journal of Photography of March 12, 1897, Donisthorpe said: “I agreed to give him (Croft) an interest in my invention for drawing and supervising construction of the instrument, as I was at that time busy with other work.” He noted that Croft had never claimed to be its inventor. As the reader will recall, Donisthorpe had named his idea, the Kinesigraph, twelve years before this arrangement with Croft.

Donisthorpe and Croft obtained a British patent in 1889 but that expired when not renewed after four years. Donisthorpe complained that an adverse report of some alleged experts killed his plan when he attempted to obtain financing from Sir George Newnes, who might have been the film’s first patron. Newnes had made his fortune as a newspaper and magazine owner. He invested a large sum in the Norwegian South Pole expedition of 1898 but was dissuaded from backing motion pictures. Donisthorpe’s idea was called “wild, visionary and ridiculous and that the only result of attempting to photograph motion would be an indescribable blur.”

“I shall ask in the future,” Donisthorpe continued, “to give me all I shall ever get in return for my time and thought, namely, the credit of having been the first to invent, and the first to patent the Kinesigraph, the photography of motion.” He also noted that as a barrister he would not care to defend the monopoly of any patentee after 1889. But he was never called upon for that, for in England, as elsewhere, the motion picture patent situation eventually became a hopeless muddle.

In the March 26, 1897 issue of the same publication, the British Journal of Photography, Donisthorpe also commented on his Kinesigraph: “The instrument was patented, made and worked before any other saw the light. I do not pretend the results were in all respects satisfactory. What first machine ever is?” Donisthorpe expressed surprise that some had not attempted to copy his machine which operated with a single moving lens and took pictures two and one-half inches in diameter on sensitized paper. This was later made transparent by the application of petroleum jelly or castor oil, a process which Eastman had used, for still pictures, with paper roll film in the United States from 1884 until his film base was developed late in 1889. Donisthorpe held that the continuous action with the moving lens providing the necessary intermittency was a decided advantage over other types: “In one particular, my own invention is so vastly superior even now to all that have come after it, that I am surprised practical men have not adopted it, now that it is open to the English public to do so.” As interesting as Donisthorpe’s idea was even in 1877 and also in 1889, it is very unlikely that his machine was satisfactory. Even now the intermittent motion picture camera and projector hold practical supremacy except in the case of very high speed photography for scientific purposes.

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842–1890), who worked in England, the United States and France, was the son of a French officer who was a friend of Daguerre, the pioneer in photography. Le Prince became a photographer, under the influence of Daguerre and in 1870 went to work in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, where he had his own shop. From shortly after 1880 to 1889 he was in the United States, returning then to Leeds.

Le Prince proposed a multiple-lens camera-projector system. On January 10, 1888 he applied for an American patent, which was issued on November 16 of the same year, on a “Method of an apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life.” In Le Prince’s method, two strips of sensitized paper or other material would be fed alternately through a camera and projector equipped with two sets of rotating lenses. It has been said that Le Prince also had an idea of a system using only one lens.

Years later, at the trial of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company against Thomas A. Edison, a model of the Le Prince camera-projector was introduced together with results purportedly made by Joe Mason of Biograph, but it was unsatisfactory—the double lens system did not produce evenly spaced pictures and each had to be printed separately. Furthermore, the background had to be treated specially or the figures would appear to jump right and left, because each lens took pictures from a slightly different angle.

Le Prince disappeared in 1890 when he was visiting in France prior to returning to the United States, some investigators have asserted, to show a perfected model of his projector-camera. The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved.

John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, an optician and instrument maker of Bath, England, had developed about 1866 the Bio-Phantoscope, an application of the Plateau magic-disk. He maintained a continuing interest in photography.

About 1882 William Friese Greene (1855–1921), a young man who was a friend of the English photographer Talbot, came into contact with Rudge. In 1885 Greene opened a camera shop in London. A few years later he demonstrated before the Photographic Society a little projection instrument made by Rudge which showed four pictures in rapid succession as, for example, the change of an expression from grave to gay, or a face in the act of blushing. That device was considerably more primitive than the projector first invented by Uchatius, long before Greene was born.

In May of 1890 Rudge showed at a meeting of the Bath Photographic Society a new optical lantern fitted with a mechanism which aimed to represent, by means of a series of photographic slides, men and animals moving as in life. That device, an improvement of the earlier Rudge projector, had one condenser to gather the light and four small projection lenses. Greene suggested the addition of the coloring effects by coating parts of the slides with pigments.

However, the machine was described as unfinished, though in the Photographic News of May 30th it was stated, “The effects were, from an entertainment point of view, vastly superior to those produced by Mr. Muybridge and others by the application of the Thaumatrope principle, the unpleasant jerkiness of which is well known.” But it was stated that Rudge’s machine had several serious defects. The pictures were small and limited to only a few in number. Greene also had a model and gave a demonstration in London which seemed to impress only a Mr. Chang of the Chinese Embassy, one of the invited guests.

The Greene-Rudge or Rudge-Greene machine was partially the work of Mortimer Evans, a civil engineer, with whom Greene made contact in 1889. That year they applied jointly for a patent on a film device. The same year Evans sold out his interest for a reported £1,200 and Greene was in financial troubles.

The Greene-Rudge-Evans device was a box film camera which, it was claimed, could be converted into a projector. By this time celluloid film was available in England as well as in the United States and France. According to the February 28, 1890, Photographic News, the camera could take ten photographs a second. The Greene camera, measuring eight by nine by nine-and-a-quarter inches, could take 300 pictures, and a smaller model turned out by Evans, 100 pictures. The reviewer of 1890 wrote, “the object of it is to obtain consecutive pictures of things in motion which can afterwards be rapidly consecutively projected on a screen so as to reproduce, say, a street scene, with the horses, human beings, and other things moving as in nature.” Greene this same year claimed that his machine camera would have important military uses. In this he was farsighted, as the modern motion picture camera is an important instrument of military reconnaissance, record and instruction as World War II has so amply demonstrated.

In the British Journal of Photography for December 5, 1895, A. T. Story defended Greene’s priority of invention and claimed that Greene’s projection apparatus of 1889–90 was a success. That conclusion is not inescapable. There appears no concrete evidence that Greene-Rudge-Evans achieved screen projection, for it is obvious that had they done so it would have been widely acclaimed at the time. But they did make a camera and attempted a projector. The camera apparently was practical. Marey and others in France, Anschütz in Germany, Edison, and Wallace Goold Levison in Brooklyn and W. N. Jennings of the U. S. Weather Bureau in Chicago, among others, were making successful motion picture films at that time. Projection remained the great problem.

In 1893 Greene obtained a patent on a device related to the Chronophotographe developed by John Varley, a member of the English landscape painting family. His projection idea included a loop formed by means of intermittent pressure on the film passing before the lens. Greene’s November 29, 1893, patent application, accepted exactly one year later, was “to produce by means of reflected light artificial scenery to take the place of the ordinary scenery or background.” It included “improvements in apparatus for exhibiting panoramic, dissolving or changing views and in the manufacture of slides for the use thereof.” From this it is clear that even as late as 1893 Greene’s idea was limited in scope and effectiveness. At this time Greene made some pictures in Hyde Park with a large portable camera.

It was described as a camera and projector in one, but that combination, without many modifications, has never been entirely practical.

Greene had an unhappy, ill-starred life and though not a great inventor deserved better. About 1899 he made attempts at color motion pictures, using a rotating lens with a filter, but here again he was unsuccessful. About 1911 he was brought to the United States to testify in the motion picture patent suit but he did not impress the American attorneys representing Edison’s opponents, and he never was called to the witness stand. About 1915 it was reported that he was destitute and Will Day, English motion picture expert, and others, organized a relief fund in his behalf and later he had a minor position with a color photo-engraving firm. At a dinner in his honor in 1921, just after he had once again told the story of his pioneer work on motion pictures, he dropped dead. Apparently his projection efforts were doomed to failure, because they never were based on sound principles. The double lens system has never been made to work satisfactorily.

Marey, who was now using strips of coated celluloid for his instantaneous photographs, sought to devise a suitable projector. This he accomplished in 1893 with what was perhaps the first efficient motion picture projector which could handle more than one brief scene, using long strips of coated celluloid film instead of pictures set on a disk. In order to obtain sufficient illumination, it used sunlight instead of an electric arc or other source of light. This limited Marey’s projector to laboratory use, though as late as 1915 some experts claimed that sunlight was better than the electric arc for magic lantern projection.

An available illustration of Marey’s projector shows the path of the rays which are reflected from the sun by a heliostat. That device was invented by the Dutch scientist, Willem Jacob, and is simply a mechanically driven reflector which keeps the light of the sun focused on a single spot by compensating for the movement of the earth. In Marey’s projector the sun’s rays are interrupted by a hand driven shutter wheel and reflected by two mirrors through the film, the light then passing through the projection lens and throwing the pictures onto the screen.

“The motion of the film,” Marey wrote, “as it halts at each flash, is brought about by an apparatus not shown in the figure. It is similar to that of the simple chronophotographic apparatus (camera), with the difference that the positive film, having its ends fastened together to make an endless belt, passes over a series of rollers which stretch it taut.” This roller system was probably similar to that used by Edison in his peep-show Kinetoscope.

The projector, Marey himself admitted, was not perfect. “The principal imperfection of the chronophotographic projector was a jerkiness due to imperfect equality of the intervals.” This resulted from the fact that Marey did not perforate the film because he thought the space along the edge should not be wasted. He knew that Edison had been successful through the use of four perforations on each side of every frame, or picture. He was free to copy this, had he wished, because Edison did not patent the method abroad.

Meanwhile, Marey continued his work and finally, in 1898, announced a successful projector system which overcame his chief difficulty which was the even spacing of the pictures without using the Edison perforations.

His system featured specially constructed rollers which gripped the edges of the film. The next year Marey worked out a combination of the motion picture camera and the microscope, opening the way for much progress in scientific research. He continued to study motion and in 1899 improved his early photographic gun camera so that it would handle about 65 feet of film at one loading. Marey, who was interested only in science and not in commercial exploitation, needed funds which he eventually received from the American Smithsonian Institute, whose secretary, Samuel P. Langley, the aeronautical pioneer, had been following the French physiologist’s motion picture studies, including his pioneer work in photographing air currents.

Marey’s motto, so far as motion pictures were concerned, was: “It is not the most interesting motion pictures that are the most useful.” In this he stood against commercialization, and always for instructional uses.

In 1893 Demeny broke with Marey and patented on October 10, 1893, under his own name, a modification of the Marey camera, which he called the Bioscope. This he was able to do, even though the method had been known at Marey’s laboratory, simply because Marey had never actually adopted it. French patents were regularly issued upon application.

Demeny was the motion picture amateur or home-movie-maker’s first friend. The instantaneous photographic devices of Marey and others were relatively clumsy and expensive. Demeny brought out a portable camera suitable for amateur use. In operation this model was held over one arm, making it necessary for the cameraman to photograph a scene which he did not see at all, or only imperfectly out of the corner of his eye. Demeny’s film was given an intermittent action through two eccentrically mounted pins used as the roll holders. Demeny realized that the pictures must be taken at equal intervals of time and also evenly spaced on the film for successful results. His eccentric camera never actually achieved this result.

In 1891 Demeny became interested in studying speech. In this work he was associated with H. Marischelle, then a young professor at the French national institute for deaf mutes. Marischelle and Demeny had the idea that through photographs of speech the deaf could learn to talk. Demeny developed the Photophone and the Photoscope, which were modified versions of the Marey camera system and a lantern projector equipped with an oxyhydrogen light. Demeny made close-up instantaneous photographs of persons speaking. The phrase, “Vive la France” was a popular subject.

Demeny said that the apparatus, “conserves the expression of the face as the voice is preserved in the phonograph.” He added that it was, “possible even to join the phonograph to his phonoscope to complete the illusion.” That was the idea expressed by Donisthorpe in 1877 and on which Edison had been working since 1887—the combined projector and phonograph or the talking motion picture which indeed was not to be perfected for many decades.

In the Spring of 1892 Demeny tried to exploit commercially the system of Talking Photographs or, more accurately, moving pictures of the action of the mouth in speaking. Demeny always blamed the organization, the Société Générale du Phonoscope with which he was associated, for not developing his work. It is probable however, that the Demeny machines were not entirely satisfactory. A few years later, after successful projection of motion pictures had been achieved on a commercial basis, Demeny became associated with Léon Gaumont, and a number of early French machines carried Demeny’s name though he alone was not entirely responsible for the design. Demeny and Gaumont developed a projector which included a gear wheel which fitted into perforations on the film and an eccentric pin similar to Marey’s camera system.

Anschütz, one of the first successful photographers of motion, after Muybridge, and the one who introduced the electric Geissler tube as a method of illumination and projection of a series of still photos to create the illusion of motion, was continuing his work in Germany in this period. On November 15, 1894, he obtained a French patent on a “process of projection of images in stroboscopic movement.” This projector had an intermittent light arrangement and may have been better than Marey’s sun model of 1893, because Anschütz was a professional photographer and maker of optical instruments while Marey was a professional physiologist.

In November of 1895 Anschütz showed an improved model of his projector at the Postal Building in the Artilleriestrasse, Düsseldorf, Germany. A contemporary account in the journal, Photographisches Archiv, published by Dr. Paul E. Liesegang, reported that the demonstration was “before an invited crowd and was rightly received with great enthusiasm by all the persons present.” Anschütz had improved his projection apparatus to a point at which images could be thrown life-size on a screen. Before that time pictures projected by his Elektrisch Schnellseher were only the size of the original pictures and thus could be seen by only a few spectators at one time. Anschütz had both motion pictures and many stills on his program, including scenes taken when the cornerstone of the Reichstag Building was laid. Once again the military connection of magic shadows was shown as Anschütz projected scenes of army life. After the demonstration Colonel A. D. Tanera stressed the importance of motion picture photography for the study of military history and also for making observations in the field.

Reynaud, the first magic shadow showman of modern times and the immediate forerunner of the motion picture exhibitor of our day, was now operating his Théâtre Optique in Paris. He achieved the first solid commercial success of the art. From 1892 to 1900, when the competition of real motion pictures forced him to close, 500,000 persons attended the Reynaud screen entertainments which were presented every day from three to six in the afternoon and eight to eleven at night. (Illustration facing page 148.)

The projection apparatus used at the Théâtre Optique was a modification of Reynaud’s original Praxinoscope of 1877 and his simple projector model of 1882. The scenes were painted on transparent celluloid and one magic lantern provided the background and another optical system which handled the moving film cast the motion effects onto the screen. Rear projection was used with the apparatus concealed on the theatre stage behind the screen. In 1889 Reynaud had obtained a patent on a perforated band of film and he was the first to introduce on a commercially practical basis reels or spools to handle the film. Reynaud was not content to show merely scenes of action but wished to tell a story. Before long it was found that the story film or familiar feature picture was the most popular all over the world.

“Poor Little Peter” (Pauvre Pierrot) was one of the most popular of Reynaud’s film shows. Harlequin and Colombine were other popular characters. Reynaud provided some of the earliest uses of trick projection, for his apparatus was fully reversible and at times he would create novel and hilarious effects by making the characters jump backwards.

Reynaud stood between the Shadow Plays and pantomimes of the ancients and the modern motion picture. Though he took no part in the development of motion picture photography and its application to the screen, he influenced the art-science by pioneering in the dramatic use of the medium, as well as introducing technical devices which were readily adaptable to motion picture use.

Reynaud was, as Porta two-and-a-half centuries before, a showman. But while he was entertaining the public with screen pictures, the efforts of Marey, Greene, Rudge, Evans, Donisthorpe and many others, including Edison, were preparing the way for the screen art and science of magic shadows. At last the valid motion picture was ready for its public screen debut.