The development capital in the story of the magic shadow art-science shifted many times. Seas, mountains, oceans and time itself were no barriers. Successively, Greece, Arabia, Persia, England, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Austria and the United States took the lead in showing the way toward the goal of genuinely life-like pictures. After the great spurt of activity in Philadelphia, during the working life of the Langenheims, the chief center of activity was Paris and the leader was Etienne Jules Marey.

Plateau in Belgium came to the invention of the magic disk, which was the first “motion picture” device, through his study of vision and the desire to understand more about it. Marey, by his own action and the work of others influenced by him, gave great impetus to the photographing and projection of motion pictures, through his wish to learn more about movement, the movement of life—animals, birds, and men.

Marey was one of the first great physiologists and conducted for years what was then the only private, scientific laboratory in France. He was born in Beaume, France, in 1830, and when nineteen went to Paris to study medicine. Six years later he became an interne and, in 1859, received his doctor’s degree, doing at this time his first important work on animal locomotion. In 1869 he became a professor at the College of France and three years later he was admitted to the Academy of Medicine, and, in 1878, to the Academy of Science.

About 1867 Marey started to study the attitudes of animals in movement through the aid of a Plateau magic disk and drawings made with the aid of Mathias Duval, professor of anatomy at the School of Beaux Arts. Some of the designs used by Marey in the Wheel of Life and a magic lantern projector were drawn by Col. Duhousset, a great horseman and artist, from very early and imperfect instantaneous photographs.

Prior to Marey there had been a number of attempts to record motion by photography. The most successful was by the French astronomer, Pierre Jules César Janssen (1824–1907) who used a photogun, Revolver Photographique, to record the transit of Venus in Japan in 1874. Janssen may have been influenced by Marey’s earliest work. Dr. R. L. Maddox in 1871 had developed in England dry plate photography, based on Scott Archer’s wet plate process. This helped to make instantaneous photography, or Chronophotography, as it was called, possible.

Janssen perfected the first workable motion picture camera. But it was a large, stationary piece of apparatus, limited in scope and sensitiveness. The device was described by a French astronomer, C. Flammarion, in the magazine La Nature of May 8, 1875, and by Janssen himself in the Bulletin of the French Photographic Societies of April 7, 1876. Janssen’s device took forty-eight pictures on a simple revolving plate but he said the number could easily be doubled or tripled. A time clock mechanism controlled the revolutions of the photographic plate but it was so arranged that it could also be rotated by hand. An electrical hook-up also was possible.

The influence of Plateau’s magic disk is clear and so acknowledged by Janssen. The device simply reversed the old Plateau disk which showed motion pictures through two revolving disks, one with the pictures and the other with the shutter slits. In the Janssen astronomical gun the one disk was coated with photographic chemicals and the other had the usual slits; the necessary intermittent movement was provided by the gear driven mechanism which rotated the disks.

Janssen pointed out that the apparatus could be used for physiological purposes—to study walking, running, flight and the movement of animals; but he never had time to develop the device for physiological uses, which was not in his immediate field. He was, however, interested in Marey’s later refinements and applications.

The most important “precursor” of motion picture photography and projection, so far as the basic idea was concerned, was Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837–1920), a Frenchman who developed the first successful method of printing color pictures. Louis liked science, painting and music but was held back in school on account of poor health. At the age of 15, he was a good pianist. He began his experiments in natural color printing around 1859 and by the Fall of 1868 had achieved success. The public reaction was not enthusiastic and Louis became discouraged. Many persons were hostile to his method which he hoped would bring books, illustrated with many color plates, within reach of everyone (as others following his system eventually achieved). It was for this reason that he failed to exploit his camera and picture projector idea.

In March and December of 1864 Louis Ducos du Hauron took out the first patents on a complete motion picture system, including an apparatus to register and reproduce motion by photography. The French patent was described in these words, “Apparatus for the photographic reproduction of any view together with all changes the subject undergoes during a certain time.” A mechanic of Agen where Louis lived for many years with his older brother, Alcide, constructed a model of the device. It was not successful because the available photographic materials were not sufficiently sensitive. Ducos’ patent even provided for the use of “bands” of paper; bands or reels of film finally solved the motion picture problem but not until near the end of the 19th century. As in one of Uchatius’ projectors, the camera and projector of Louis Ducos du Hauron used a number of small lenses.

Other patents taken out by this small, slender, timid Frenchman who only became truly animated when talking about one of his inventions, included color photography in 1868, a horizontal wind-mill in 1869, a combined natural and photographic camera in 1874, photographic devices in 1888 and 1892. In 1896 he again turned to motion pictures, after others had perfected them, proposing an optical system intended to do away with all interruption of light in motion picture projection and photography.

Honors came very late in life to Ducos du Hauron and to his dying day he reproached himself for not exploiting sufficiently his ideas. But when he had tried to do this he encountered only indifference because the scientists were not interested in the work of one who was without academic status. Now Ducos du Hauron is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses of photography. He actually predicted and described a monopack color film. The many good color processes of this type are modern realizations of his extraordinary scientific analyses.

Marey was familiar in a general way with all these developments and ideas, but he was essentially a scientist and not a photographer. Motion picture photography to him was just a good way of learning more about living movement. About 1870 he had made studies of movements in other ways in addition to primitive photographs and drawings made from such photographs. The results of these studies were known all over the world and had a direct influence on the photographers who first successfully took successive pictures of animals in motion. These photographers were Eadweard Muybridge and John D. Isaacs.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), or Edward James Muggeridge, as he was originally named, was born in England, at Kingston-on-Thames. As a young man he was an adventurer who called photography his profession. He made a number of trips back and forth between the United States and England. He was seriously injured in a run-away stage coach accident in July of 1860, in Arkansas, and later obtained several thousand dollars in damages from the Southern Overland Stage Company. Returning to the United States after a visit in England, following the accident, Muybridge received an assignment to photograph, for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the new territory of Alaska, purchased by the United States in 1867. After this assignment he settled in San Francisco.

In 1872 Governor Leland Stanford of California made a $25,000 bet in connection with a dispute as to whether or not all the legs of a horse running at a full gallop are off the ground simultaneously. The eye was not quick enough to find the answer. Horsemen had never been completely satisfied with the drawings and pictures made by artists of horses in motion. Sanford, as Terry Ramsaye describes in his history of the motion picture, A Million and One Nights, in 1872 sent for the photographer Muybridge and had him go to the Sacramento race track to get photographic proof in order to settle the dispute. Over a period of years Stanford spent considerably more than the $25,000 wager on the photographic experiments. And out of the experiments grew the legend that Muybridge had invented “motion pictures.”

About 1870 Marey had established the movement of the legs of a horse in a gallop through his physiological investigations. But at that time he had no photographic proof of his theory. Years later Muybridge said that Stanford obtained his basic ideas for photographs to win the bet from the writings of Marey.

Muybridge might have been successful in his early experiments if it had not been for an interruption which was of about five years’ duration. He had domestic troubles of a nature that ended in violence. In October 1874, he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyn who had eloped with his wife. After a sensational trial in which the defense was able to succeed in putting the jurors mentally in Muybridge’s place, he was acquitted on February 5, 1875, at the courthouse in Napa, California.

Stanford maintained a friendly interest in Muybridge because he had become increasingly interested in the problem of the movements of a horse in fast action and he wished to obtain evidence to confirm the new theory of animal locomotion which had been developed chiefly by Marey in France. Stanford was primarily interested in the running gaits of horses and other movements secondarily.

The stories of what really happened in 1877 are not identical. Muybridge said in 1883 at a lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, “Being much interested with the experiments of Professor Marey... I invented a method of employing a number of cameras .... I explained my intended experiments to a wealthy resident of San Francisco, Mr. Stanford, who liberally agreed to place the resources of his stock breeding farm at my disposal and to reimburse the expenses of my investigation, upon the condition of my supplying him, for his private use, with a few copies of the contemplated results.”

On the mere statement, Muybridge’s position is subject to serious question. It certainly is unlikely that Stanford would pay all expenses just to obtain a few copies of the “intended results for private use.” The ownership of the results was subject to considerable dispute. Stanford copyrighted the pictures in 1881 and had them published in a book edited by Dr. J. D. B. Stillman, entitled The Horse in Motion. In that book the story is that when Muybridge returned to San Francisco in 1877, he was engaged to continue the experiments by Stanford. According to Stillman, in 1877 pictures were taken of one of Stanford’s horses, with a single camera and “one of these, representing him with all his feet clear of the ground, was enlarged, retouched and distributed to the parties interested.” This then was just another effort to obtain a good, sharp, fast, single picture of action.

John D. Isaacs, later chief engineer for the Harriman Railroad System, had designed and supervised all the installation of the battery camera apparatus. His name was suggested to Stanford by Arthur Brown, then chief engineer of maintenance of the Central Pacific, one of Stanford’s interests. Isaacs was a young man fresh from the University of Virginia, where he had graduated in 1875. He was an amateur photographer and very familiar with Marey’s work and that of the photographers in France and England and in the eastern part of the United States.

In 1878 further efforts were made at Stanford’s private track at Palo Alto, where the battery system of cameras was introduced and good results obtained. Each camera in the battery was equipped with a fast-acting shutter and was set off successively by a mechanical-electrical device. (Illustration on opposite page.)

The most successful results, which were little better than silhouettes, were obtained when twenty-four cameras, set about one foot apart, were used. The photographs actually were not made at equal intervals of time but of space. The cameras and background were lined up for a measurement of distance and not of time.

Although Isaacs contributed engineering skill to the development of the apparatus, because he was chiefly interested in railroad engineering and this assignment in his photographic hobby was a favor for the “big boss,” Muybridge alone obtained the patents on the method. On June 27 and July 11, 1878 he applied for a patent on, “A method and apparatus for photographing objects in motion” (the battery system), and for the double action shutter controls. The patents were issued in March, 1879. Wet collodion plates were used in each camera and a speed of up to 1/5000th of a second was claimed by Muybridge in his applications. Isaacs later became chief engineer of the Southern Pacific Railroad System while Muybridge made “scientific” photography a profession.

During later life Muybridge sought to establish himself as a scientist and in this effort he drew heavily on physiological data which originated with Marey in France. Muybridge was a photographer, who, through the resources of Stanford, a rich and determined backer, came into possession of a method of taking successive pictures of action. Even though the method was cumbersome and inexact, Muybridge never changed it but continued to exploit it for the rest of his life.

Marey, in France, was delighted to hear of the results of Muybridge’s work and to inspect them, for here at last was excellent confirmation of his physiological theories. Marey, while praising the work of Muybridge, noted certain errors resulting from the battery camera system—the landscape and not the animal appeared to be moving when the resulting photographs were analyzed in the Plateau magic disk and also the time interval, as noted above, was not exact.

Marey was the first to synthesize motion from the photographs by mounting them so the action could be reconstructed. Muybridge had no interest in this phase of the subject until he met Marey and learned from him. Even afterwards Muybridge continued to be interested chiefly in taking pictures and not in studying and analyzing them. Technically speaking, Marey analyzed and synthesized the results obtained in the Muybridge photographs.

In addition to using the simple Plateau disk which only one person at a time could see, Marey somewhat later had the photographs copied on glass slides, mounted on a revolving disk and projected onto a screen with the Uchatius type projector, equipped with a revolving slit shutter. This scientific demonstration was the first actual motion picture show of real motion and not posed as in the Heyl, Bourbouze and other demonstrations of about 1870.

Gaston Tissandier, editor of La Nature, in the December 7, 1878, issue wrote on “The Attitudes of the Horse, represented by instantaneous photography,” and discussed the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge of San Francisco which were on display at the firm of Brandon and Morgan Brown, 1, Rue Lafitte, Paris. The early work of Marey was mentioned and the importance of the new pictures was stressed.

On December 28, 1878, a letter of Marey’s, published in La Nature, expressed the hope that Muybridge would also record and analyze the action of birds in flight as well as animals in motion. Marey mentioned how effective such pictures would be in the Wheel of Life disks and their value in zoology. There also Marey spoke of a photographic gun which he was to invent later.

A return letter from Muybridge was published on February 17, 1879 in the same magazine: “Please have the goodness to transmit to Professor Marey the assurance of my highest esteem and tell him that the reading of his celebrated book on animal mechanism had inspired Governor Stanford with the first idea of the possibility of solving the problem of locomotion with the aid of photography. Mr. Stanford consulted me in this matter and, on his request, I decided to undertake the task. He asked me to follow a most complete series of experiments.” Muybridge said also that he was using as many as thirty cameras, mounted twelve inches apart, and that he planned to study all movements, including flights of birds in which Marey was so interested at the time.

In the March 17 issue of La Nature, Marey expressed pleasure that Muybridge was undertaking study of birds in flight. In the same issue there appeared an interesting letter from Eugene Vassel, Captain of Armament at the Suez Canal, dated January 20, 1879, commenting on Marey’s idea of a photographic gun and telling of an idea for a similar automatic camera. This illustrates that at the time, even at the ends of the earth, farthest removed from principal educational and scientific centers, the problem of photographing objects in natural movement was under study. It was then a long way, indeed, from Paris to San Francisco to Suez.

By 1880 Plateau magic disks equipped with Muybridge photographs were on sale in England and at about the same time in France. In the December 31, 1881, issue of La Nature several of these were illustrated and the possibilities of their use for instruction and entertainment were discussed. It was evident that they were common as toys in Paris. Subjects included the original one of a horse in motion and even a comedy item of a mule kicking a ball.

Muybridge, in the Summer of 1881, went to Paris and there came directly under the influence of Marey who was always most generous in expressing his appreciation of valued work. In this Marey’s nature reminds one of Plateau, the Belgian. Evidently Muybridge had not dreamed of the importance of his pictures for physiological study and other such purposes until it was explained to him. It was the pressing quest of Marey for greater perfection in duplicating nature that gave a great stimulus to the development of the motion picture art-science. Perhaps he, too, would have been surprised had he known that the motion picture, while a great instrument of science, would for many years at least find its chief use as an entertainment medium. To the last, Marey always thought of it for science and, while he did not disdain amusement uses, his interest was exclusively in broadening the field of knowledge.

In Paris Muybridge met many notables, including Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), French painter who specialized in great detail and exact duplication of nature. Meissonier appreciated the value of the Muybridge photos, as he did Marey’s work in analyzing motion in animals and men, as an aid to painting. From that time on Meissonier always kept a Plateau disk and projection device in his studio so that photographs of objects which were to be painted could be studied first by himself and his colleagues. Muybridge evidently took a liking to Meissonier and his work because he singled him out in later years as a painter (one of the few) who was exact in his representation of animals in movement even before the evidence of instantaneous photographs was available.

During his visit in Paris Muybridge not only obtained scientific knowledge from Marey and his associates but took up a practical projection device, even to the extent of appropriating the name from Charles Reynaud, a French inventor who was later to be the first great motion picture showman, even though he preferred using hand-drawn films to photographs.

Charles Emile Reynaud (1844–1918) in 1877 developed the Praxinoscope which was an ingenious arrangement of the Plateau magic disk device. The several pictures were mounted on the inside of a horizontal wheel and were viewed on a polygonal-mirror in the center. In this device a number of spectators could watch the moving figures. Light was reflected from a lamp mounted above. Photographs were also used in various of the Praxinoscope models. It was useful for color research. In an article in La Nature of February 1, 1879, it was stated that Mr. Reynaud had already planned a projection model which would throw life-size figures from the Praxinoscope onto a screen before a large audience. In 1880 the French Society of Photographers was asked to interest itself in this problem.

In 1881, or in the following year, Reynaud achieved success with the Projection Praxinoscope or Lamposcope described by Gaston Tissandier, in the November 4, 1882, issue of La Nature. One lantern threw the background and the moving device projected the motion pictures. The designs were colored on glass slides which were joined in a band. A special advantage of the Reynaud Projection Praxinoscope or Lamposcope was that no special light source was required. A common table lamp was suitable. Of course, only one scene at a time could be shown in the device for it had no reels to handle the band of glass slides.

One evening, early in 1882, Marey had Muybridge present at a large gathering. Helmholtz, Bjerknes, Govi, Crookes and others of the French Academy of Science also were present. The projector fitted with Muybridge’s photos of action was given its debut. Marey, years later, commented that those scientists never had seen anything that went so far in the reproduction of nature as Muybridge-type photographs mounted in his Zoopraxinographoscope disk and projector.

In March of 1882 Muybridge was in his native England and presented two showings of his photographs, illustrated with a projector which he called the Zoopraxiscope, borrowing the name almost entirely from Reynaud and the scientific data from Marey. Muybridge gave a lecture, “Attitudes of Animals in Motion, illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope,” at a special meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, held on March 13, 1882, with His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, honorary member, presiding. The material was previously presented in a paper read before the Royal Society. Muybridge said, “The analyses of some of the movements investigated by the aid of electro-photographic exposures ... are rendered more perfectly intelligible by the reproduction of the actual motion projection on a screen through the zoopraxiscope.”

The walk, trot, amble, rack, canter, run and gallop—which are the several gaits of a horse—were discussed at length with much emphasis on the physiological aspects. Figuratively, Marey must have been standing beside Muybridge as he talked. The lecture, virtually word for word, was given by Muybridge in February, 1833, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. But it is significant to note that then there was no mention of the Zoopraxiscope. Muybridge evidently was not a good operator and there seems to have been difficulty with the projector. Operation of the projector was a problem then because there had to be a relation between the number of pictures and the slits in the projection shutter. Muybridge seems to have found it all too much trouble and turned to the task of taking successive stills which could then be made up into handsome illustrated books.

Meanwhile, Marey in the Spring of 1882 finally finished work on his Photographical Gun which he had conceived several years previously. By this time Marey had a large open air studio set up in the Bois de Boulogne. (Illustrations facing page 121.)

Marey said that he had worked twelve years on the general subject of movement, thereby placing his first efforts back in 1870. The “beautiful instantaneous photographs of Muybridge proved his work,” he declared. He continued, saying that in 1878 he had the idea of a photographic gun somewhat analogous to the astronomical revolver of Janssen. Finally, he resolved to devote the Winter of 1882 to the realization of the project.

Marey used his gun to study his favorite project of birds in flight. Marey’s photographic gun was the first practical motion picture camera, primitive and limited though it was. In this sense it was the original of all newsreel and other portable motion picture cameras. It is worth noting that in our own time cameras are mounted as “photographic guns” in airplanes as a substitute for gunnery in peacetime and as a check on results during war.

About this time, Georges Demeny (1850–1917) became associated with Marey in this work. Marey always gave credit to his pupil, aide and collaborator. Eventually, however, they parted company because Demeny was interested in commercializing the work and Marey wished to continue with pure science. Later Demeny asserted that his motion picture ideas were superior to Marey’s and that he was responsible for the actual execution of all the plans. Demeny at thirteen had begun inventing at his home, but his father, a musician, wanted him to be a university professor. In 1874 he went to Paris and at the Sorbonne was a pupil of Marey in physiology and of Mathias Duval—who also worked with Marey—in anatomy. He did some medical studies and opened one of the first physical education establishments called, Le Cercle de Gymnastique Rationnelle. From 1880 on he supervised many of the studies at Marey’s Physiological Park.

In July, 1882, Marey proposed the use of a band of sensitized paper in the camera. For various reasons the paper was not satisfactory and, of course, was impractical for direct projection as it might be set on fire by the projection lamp. The Langenheims of Philadelphia had solved the problem of projecting photographs in the magic lantern by devising a method of printing the picture on glass. However, a projector equipped, as the original model of Uchatius, with a revolving disk could only hold a few glass slides. This limited the projected pictures to brief action.

In 1887 and 1888 Marey achieved his first real success in what he called chronophotography, using a box machine which took eight pictures a second on a single metal plate, or on a sensitized paper band. Marey had difficulty controlling the paper film because it was not perforated and the pictures were not equally spaced. This, however, made no difference to Marey since his main purpose was to obtain data for physiological study, and not entertainment motion pictures.

In 1888 Marey obtained a successful series of photographs of fishes swimming, taken with intermittent action on a paper roll film. The images were taken at the rate of either twenty or sixty per second. This method of using paper strips obviates the necessity of operating in a dark camera chamber. At first the paper photographic strips were loaded in a dark room, limiting the scope of the camera, but later light-proof cameras were perfected. Marey also proposed an optical system featuring a turning mirror which would make intermittent action unnecessary. But this method was wasteful of film.

A contemporary of Marey and Muybridge, and a skilled photographer in his own right, was Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907), a German who worked out one of the best systems for exhibiting a series of pictures prior to Edison on whom he had an influence. Shortly after the Muybridge pictures came to Europe, Anschütz began similar experiments. According to Marey, he achieved better results than Muybridge, though the results were not perfect, having a certain amount of distortion. Anschütz obtained sharper photographs of action than Muybridge for his pictures could be used in the Plateau magic disk or the projector without being copied as silhouettes as was done with Muybridge’s photographs until a late date.

In 1883 Anschütz tried to use a single camera on the Marey gun principle but achieved better results with a battery of as many as forty-eight cameras. The shutter openings in the Zoetrope or magic disk were modified according to the number of pictures in the particular series.

Anschütz’s chief claim to fame rests on the fact that he was the first to combine successfully the instantaneous pictures of an object in motion with the brilliant intermittent flash of the electric Geissler tube. Heinrich Geissler (1814–1879), a German mechanic and physicist, about 1854 invented an electric tube for the purpose of studying discharges in rarefied gases. The apparatus consisted of a thin tube of glass, equipped with platinum wires sealed into each end and filled with a rarefied gas, and an electric battery connection.

In 1889 Anschütz announced the Electrical Tachyscope, a motion picture viewing machine which became popular all over the world. His action photographs were mounted on a wheel and were lighted successively by a Geissler tube’s intermittent electric flash. The large photographs were viewed directly by the audience in an adjoining room. Anschütz’s device was first depicted in the United States in the Scientific American of November 16, 1889. A slot machine model was also devised and was shown at Frankfurt, Germany in 1891, and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where several persons saw it and were given the idea of attempting to achieve projection of life-size motion pictures of complete actions instead of mere phases of motion. (Illustration facing page 149.)

The general technique developed by Anschütz in his Electrical Tachyscope is now used in the taking of stroboscopic motion pictures. It also may be applied in new photographic, motion picture and television processes for increased depth of field.

In 1893 Muybridge lectured at the World’s Fair in Chicago at the Zoopraxographical Hall, where hundreds of his pictures were shown. The same material was published by the University of Pennsylvania under the title of Descriptive Zoopraxography, or the science of animal locomotion made popular.

Muybridge had settled down in 1885 with a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took many pictures with the same battery system, borrowing, however, some ideas about the studio arrangements from Marey. Muybridge never improved his technique or realized that such a cumbersome method could not produce satisfactory results. This did not seem to disturb him for there is no evidence that he sought large screen projection of the magic shadows before audiences.

In February 1886, Muybridge visited Edison at his New Jersey laboratory and showed him plates of successive motion pictures, or, more accurately, a succession of stills of various phases of the same action.

When Muybridge lectured at the London Institution in the Fall of 1889 a complete report was published in the British Journal of Photography for December 20, 1889, in an article by W. P. Adams. From this we learn that Muybridge was then using a simple projector fitted with a gear system which revolved before the lens a glass disk of some fifteen inches in diameter on which the photos were mounted; in front of this was a zinc shutter disk with radial slits totalling one more than the number of pictures, in order to give a forward motion to the figures. That was the old Plateau magic disk idea. With the same number of openings in the shutter as pictures, the figures would appear to move their arms and legs and yet stay in the same place; if less shutter openings, there would be an appearance of backward motion. “The disks are rotated at the same speed in opposite directions, and the figures rapidly following each other appear on the screen as a continuous movement of the animal,” the English reviewer remarked. Muybridge showed slow and normal action motion. The subjects included a mule kicking, a woman emptying a pail of water, a girl walking down steps carrying a breakfast cup and saucer, and what was said to be the best of all, a little girl finding and picking up a doll. In passing, we may note that in addition to singling out Meissonier for praise, Muybridge asserted that the Japanese were far ahead of everyone else in representing motion in art!

Muybridge eventually retired to his native Kingston, England, after winning fame through his work in America. But he obtained more than fame, for he was able to leave a considerable sum of money, in addition to his instruments, to the local museum. Efforts to locate the Muybridge instruments at the Kingston-on-Thames Museum in 1943 were unsuccessful.

In 1889, Thomas A. Edison, already working on the problem of motion pictures for a year or two, visited the Exposition at Paris and there met Marey who showed him the results obtained with his methods of motion photography, and the reproduction of the scene with a Plateau-disk combined with a projector and the disk illuminated by an electric Geissler tube.

This electrically driven machine, displayed at the exhibit of Fontaine, a French engineer, showed pictures of animals in motion, as well as men and birds. The old photo stand-by of horses in motion in different gaits again was featured. This system rather pleased Marey, as he remarked that it would be hard to construct a better Wheel of Life, though Edison had even then accomplished it in his laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey. The limitations of the method, however, were fully recognized by Marey who mentioned the small number of images which could be shown, the restricted enlargement, and the intermittent movement troubles. Also, the device was noisy and the flicker had not been eliminated.

Thus the year of 1889 brought together two great figures, Marey, a pure scientist whose zeal for learning about locomotion resulted in improvements in what was to be the motion picture art-science, and Edison who invented the first entirely practical motion picture camera and the first film peep-show device which was to be the inspiration for projectors as they were finally established, setting the pattern even to our day.