The idea of producing apparent animation by means of pictures is by no means new. The origin of the most primitive form of moving picture device is lost in the mists of antiquity; but it is certain that long before photography was conceived animated pictures were in vogue, and constituted a source of infinite amusement among children. The illusion was secured by a simple device known as the Zoetrope or the “Wheel of Life.” It consists of a small cylinder, mounted on a vertical spindle in such a way that it is free to revolve horizontally. A band of thin cardboard, or thick paper, on which is painted a series of pictures, generally in colour, depicting successive stages in a particular movement, such as a horse jumping, a child swinging, or two youngsters playing see-saw, is placed horizontally around the inside of the lower half of the cylinder. The upper half is pierced at regular intervals by long narrow slits or vertical openings, which come opposite the pictures and extend only about half-way down the length of the wall. When the cylinder is rotated sharply and one looks through the slits, the pictures portray apparent motion—the horse rises and falls in the jump, the swing moves to and fro, and the see-saw goes up and down—in accordance with the laws of visual persistence.

Each successive picture, it must be pointed out, is interrupted by the space in the surface of the wall between two consecutive slits through which one peeps into the cylinder. We have, in fact, a cinematograph in the most primitive form; the space between the apertures corresponding to the opaque sector of the shutter of the camera and the projector, whereby one picture is eclipsed from view on the screen to permit the next to be brought before the lens. Indeed, one can easily convert the zoetrope into a cinematograph if, instead of painted pictures, prints of a cinematograph film are mounted in the same way. As a matter of fact, some ingenious person followed this practice years ago, thus unconsciously producing the first animated pictures by photography, and in a crude way anticipating the kinetoscope.

From time to time the zoetrope was modified and revived in the praxinoscope, phenakistoscope, zoopraxinoscope, and a number of other forms with awe-inspiring names. In every instance, however, it was merely our old friend in a new guise. One of these modifications created a flutter of excitement in France in 1877. It was called the “praxinoscope,” and its creator, M. Reynaud, for the first time enabled a large audience to see animation upon the screen.

In this case projection was carried out in a highly novel manner. The front, or proscenium opening, of the stage was occupied by a large white screen, such as is used for magic lantern projection, the operator and his apparatus being on the stage behind, out of sight. Accordingly the audience saw the picture through the sheet. At the back of the stage a limelight lantern was set up, from which a still life picture was thrown, filling the greater part of the surface of the screen. The picture thus shown formed as it were the setting for the animated picture, in just the same way as the scenery comprises the environment for a stage play.

Below the level of the stage was a large rectangular table, at each corner of which were placed small vertical rollers. At one end of the table were two large spools, fitted with handles which were revolved horizontally. One spool carried a long band of transparent material, on which were painted at regular intervals silhouette figures in colour in successive stages of movement. The band led from this spool round the vertical roller immediately adjacent, then along the side of the table to the next corner, on to the next corner, on to the third corner, back to the fourth corner, and then to the empty reel, on which it was wound. By simultaneously rotating the loaded spool with the left hand, and the second reel with the right hand, the transparent picture band was passed round the table from one spool to the other.

Centrally with the sheet, and on a level with the table, there was a second limelight lantern, the back of which was towards the audience. This lantern threw its rays upward at an angle of forty-five degrees or so. As the band of pictures travelled along the table edge from the first to the second corner roller, it was passed through this second lantern, which projected the silhouette picture into a mirror hung overhead at the back of the stage, which in turn reflected the image on the screen. The figures on the band thrown from the second lantern appeared in the scene of the slide shown by the first lantern. As the band was moved forward, bringing successive phases of action upon the screen, apparent motion was produced. In fact, animated pictures were shown, and it was possible with a number of spools of painted bands to produce a comedy, tragedy, or other stage play in pictures. This crude apparatus was the first attempt to portray moving pictures upon a sheet before a large audience.

As instantaneous photography developed and efforts were made to adapt photographic records instead of painted pictures to the praxinoscope, great difficulty was experienced in securing the consecutive pictures sufficiently close to one another so as to reduce the loss of action between two successive pictures to the minimum. The cameras available were not suited to this work. Too much time was lost in removing the exposed sensitised surface to permit another unexposed area to be brought before the lens.

About 1872 Mr. Muybridge, an ingenious Englishman, resident in San Francisco, conceived a novel means of obtaining snap-shot photographs in rapid succession. He maintained that such photographs taken at regular intervals, reproduced in such a manner as to simulate natural animation, would reveal the peculiar attitudes of animals in motion and would prove of invaluable service to artists. He approached Governor Stanford and unfolded his scheme. Stanford was so impressed that he placed every facility at Muybridge’s disposal for the completion of the experiment, including the use of his valuable stud of horses and exercising track.

As it was impossible to secure the desired end with a single camera, Muybridge built a studio beside the track, in which twenty-four cameras were placed side by side in a row. On the opposite side of the track, facing the studio, he erected a high fence, painted white, while across the track between the studio and the screen twenty-four threads were stretched, each of which was connected with a powerful spring, which held in position the shutter of a camera.

When all was ready, a horse was driven over this length of track at a canter, gallop, trot, or walk, as desired, and as the animal passed each camera, it broke the thread controlling its shutter, so that the horse photographed itself in its progress. In these experiments, however, Muybridge made no effort to secure detail. The photographs were taken in brilliant sunlight, and the white screen threw a dazzling reflection, causing the objects to stand out in bold relief, so that the record appeared in silhouette. As these photographs were taken for a specific purpose—the analysis of movement—the screen was subdivided into panels, whereby it was possible to determine the distance between each successive picture. (Fig. 1.)

As Muybridge’s experiments were carried out upon a somewhat private basis, the information about them that reached Europe was of a very meagre description. In France, however, they aroused a strong curiosity and peculiar interest, especially in artistic and scientific circles. They appealed especially to one man—Meissonier. The great artist, whose accuracy in the most minute detail was proverbial, was fascinated. He had observed very closely the curious attitudes that horses assume when in rapid motion, and had committed the observations to his canvases, only to meet with strenuous hostile criticism from his colleagues and the public. So when Governor Stanford, while visiting Paris, displayed some of Muybridge’s photographs, the great painter spent hours in studying them, and characterised them as an incalculable aid to art. Through Governor Stanford, he extended an invitation to Muybridge.

In the following year the Anglo-American experimenter—who might be described as the father of animated photography—visited the French capital, and received a warm greeting by Meissonier. The artist had been criticised for his views concerning muscular action, as displayed by the animals on his canvases, yet here was a man who could demonstrate, by the conclusive evidence of photography, that his views were correct. Meissonier arranged a private demonstration, which ranked as one of the most important social events of the year in Paris. Among those who accepted the invitation to witness the new wonder were Gerome, Goupil, Steinheil, Detaillé, Alexander Dumas, and Dr. Mallez. Muybridge had brought a representative collection of photographs with him, showing horses in movement, dogs, deer, and other animals running and jumping, as well as men wrestling, leaping, and performing other athletic exercises.

The pictures were examined at great length individually. Then by means of the zoopraxoscope, a form of the wheel of life, whereby pictures in action could be thrown upon the screen, they were displayed in animation, thereby conclusively demonstrating the fact that what appeared so incredibly singular an attitude in a painting or an individual photograph was in reality part of a graceful harmonious natural movement.

There was one feature of Muybridge’s work which must not be overlooked, and which decidedly restricted its application. A battery of cameras had to be employed, placed side by side. It was as if a number of photographers, standing in a row, pressed a button the instant the object in motion was opposite their respective cameras. All the photographs were broadside views, and taken from the same relative position. The results were not as the following eye of one person saw them, but as the eyes of twenty or thirty persons standing side by side grasped a glimpse of motion during the five-thousandth part of a second. If Muybridge had attempted to take 900 photographic impressions, such as the cinematograph camera records in the space of a minute to-day, he would have required nine hundred cameras for the purpose.

Of course, such a plan had no commercial possibilities. Its real value lay in the fact that it stimulated the ingenuity of a host of inventive brains towards the solution of animated photography. One and all were bent upon securing the same result that Muybridge had achieved, but with a single camera and from one point of view. Among these experimenters the names of Greene and Evans, Acres and Paul stand pre-eminent in Great Britain, while France and the United States had an equal number of contemporaneous investigators engaged upon the problem. Even Muybridge himself attempted its solution, for he realised only too well that a battery of cameras was impracticable to ensure the commercial success of animated photography.

It appears to be a sorry trick of fortune that every great invention, or development, should produce a bevy of claimants for the honour of being the “original inventor.” The word “original” is somewhat obscure and ambiguous, but it is employed frequently. As a matter of fact, it is a wise invention that can single out its creator. Animated photography has been no exception to the rule. Lawyers and the courts have reaped a rich harvest from protracted litigation in the effort to settle the question once and for all, with the inevitable result—the law has left the matter in a more hazy condition than ever.

The claim to the discovery of animated photography can scarcely be sustained by any one man. Desvignes devised an apparatus in 1860; Du Mont formulated the first tangible scheme of chronophotography, as it is called, in 1861, which Donisthorpe put into practice in 1876, while a host of other experimenters contributed to the problem in some particular detail. It was not invention, for the simple reason that there was nothing to invent; it was merely evolution and the perfection of details. As we have seen, what the experimenters had to accomplish was the reduction of the length of time occupied in bringing one sensitised surface before the lens after the preceding sensitised surface had been exposed. This was a matter of mechanical detail, for the chemist accelerated the speed of the sensitised surface more and more, and finally evolved the celluloid film. Various means of bringing successive sections of a sensitised surface before the lens were evolved, and produced a plethora of patents; but the perfection of details does not affect the fundamental principle of animated photography. In Great Britain many investigators were energetic in the quest, but the great majority never succeeded beyond the model stage; that is to say, their apparatuses never possessed any practical value, and only served to emphasise once more the truth of the well-worn axiom that there is a great gulf between the creative mind of the inventor and the commercial world with its enormous capacity for development and exploitation.

Among the early British experimenters was W. F. Greene, who, like others, was handicapped by having to make use of glass plates. In 1885 he displayed his first apparatus for taking and producing moving pictures, and two years later exhibited some pictures taken on glass in the window of his premises in Piccadilly. This unusual display created such interest, and the curiosity-provoked public so crowded the pavement that traffic was impeded, and the police called upon Greene to remove his pictures.

In France even greater things were being accomplished. Dr. E. J. Marey took up Muybridge’s work at the point where the Anglo-American abandoned it. Marey followed rather the lines laid down by the astronomical investigator Jansen, who in 1874 evolved a photographic revolver to secure records at short intervals of the transit of Venus across the sun’s disc. Marey constructed a photographic gun in 1882, with which he studied the flight of birds, and which worked on the principle elaborated by Jansen eight years before. The object of his quest was the analysis of motion. It will be seen, therefore, that in its very earliest stages the value of animated photography was conceded to be rather in the field of science than that of amusement. This celebrated French experimenter realised the inestimable value of “chronophotography” for the study and investigation of moving bodies, the rapidity in the changes of the position or form of which was impossible to follow otherwise. Marey, however, made no effort towards synthesis or reproduction of the motion thus obtained; he did not seek projection upon a huge scale upon the screen, but regarded chronophotography rather as a means of enabling photographic results to be resolved into diagrams for examining and elucidating obscure points incidental to motion.

Special apparatus was evolved and was set up at the Physiological Station in Paris, and some wonderful results were communicated by this industrious scientist to the French Association for the Advancement of Science at Nancy in 1886. Investigations were being carried out upon a large and advanced scale in France while the English were merely dabbling with the idea. Marey secured records of action intermittently from a single point of view by the revolution of a handle, and to a pronounced degree anticipated the present-day cinematograph.

Marey’s camera was successful in its details, especially considering the extreme difficulties attending the use of glass plates. He ascertained that in order to secure continuous motion it was imperative to cut off the light from the plate at regular intervals; and he accomplished this interruption by rotating an opaque disc, pierced with small radial slots, which permitted the light to reach the plate only intermittently. The general design of Marey’s camera is shown in Fig. 2. The camera, of the ordinary bellows type, was mounted in the upper part of a wooden frame clamped to a special support. Beneath was the handle, which rotated the shutter through gearing. This shutter moved at the back of the bellows, occupying the same position relatively as the focal plane shutter used in very rapid still-life instantaneous photography. By means of this shutter, the passage of a body across the field of the lens was split up into a number of consecutive units. The interval between two successive images, and the time of the exposure, could be altered merely by varying the revolving speed of the shutter. As a rule, the exposures were made at the rate of ten per second, but in some cases the length of the exposure was only 1/2,000th part of a second, with an interval of one-fifth second between two consecutive pictures. Marey used a black background, and his figures were clothed in white.

There was an important reason for this reversal of Muybridge’s procedure. In the latter the shutter of each camera had to be opened as the horse or other object passed the lens. In Marey’s system the sensitised surface of the plate is directed against a dead black screen, and the lens may be left open without exercising any ill effect upon the photographic plate, because the latter receives no light. When a man clothed in white passed across this black surface in full sunlight, only his figure was recorded upon the sensitised surface, and thus was thrown in strong relief against the black background.

Special arrangements, however, had to be made to ensure the success of the result. A flat plane black background did not suffice, as a certain amount of light was reflected therefrom into the lens, resulting in the plate becoming fogged. The black screen employed was in reality a black cavity, known as “Chevreul’s black.” The cavity may be likened to a shed, the front wall of which is removed, and the whole interior blackened. In the screen used by Marey at the Physiological Station in Paris, the back of the shed was hung with black velvet, the floor was covered with pitch, while the sides and ceiling were treated with a dead black medium.

These arrangements enabled Marey to secure more useful results than were possible to Muybridge. From the scientific point of view they proved of incalculable value. His marvellous pictures widened our knowledge of animal motion to a remarkable extent, and provided incontrovertible records of action. Professor Marey ultimately recorded the sum of his experiments in a volume, Movement, which is now regarded universally as a classic in physiological science, and even to-day is consulted freely for the purpose of elucidating complex and obscure phases of motion.

Other investigators at about this time were General Sebert, M. L. Soret of Geneva, and Ottomar Anschütz of Berlin. Soret succeeded in analysing some very intricate movements, while Anschütz produced a curious “wheel of life,” which was called the “electrical tachyscope.” A special camera was evolved whereby photographs were taken in rapid succession. From these negatives glass transparencies similar to lantern slides were produced, and mounted in sequence around the rim of a large wheel, which had to be of sufficient diameter to contain the whole series of pictures. It was mounted upon a massive iron pedestal, and was revolved from the rear by means of a handle.

Behind the wheel, and at the highest point, which corresponded to the level of the eyes of the average person while standing, a small box was placed. The front of this box was open, the size of this aperture corresponding exactly to the dimensions of the transparency. It was fitted with a small electric light—a Geissler tube, in fact, through which a current was passed from a Rhumkorff coil—and this light was switched on and off by each picture as it passed before the front of the lamp box. As each picture came into position before the aperture a contact was established, and an impulse of electricity was discharged through the lamp. It was a mere flash, but it served to illuminate the transparency immediately in front, so that the people gazing at the wheel received a brilliant and well-defined impression of the picture, which was shown in an apparently stationary position, though, in fact, the wheel was revolving continuously. When the wheel was rotated with sufficient speed, the flashes occurred in such rapid sequence that, in accordance with the phenomena of visual persistence, the illusion of animation was secured.

This was an extremely ingenious apparatus, but was too complicated, expensive, and elaborate to command any commercial value. It was regarded generally as a scientific toy. It was on view in London, in the Strand near Chancery Lane, for a little while, but failed to arouse very marked enthusiasm. However, the “inventor’s fiddle,” as the Anschütz tachyscope was popularly called, was adopted by several other inventors with certain modifications, but its application was naturally extremely limited. Comparatively speaking, only a very few pictures could be carried in the rim of the wheel, and as the travelling speed was somewhat high in order to convey a tangible impression of continuous motion, a subject was exhausted in a few seconds.

Associated with Dr. Marey in his experiments was another indefatigable spirit, M. Georges Demeny. He displayed considerable ingenuity in breaking down the peculiar difficulties associated with this work. Unfortunately the value of M. Demeny’s efforts have never been appreciated; but he brought his mind to bear upon the subject at a critical period, and devoted all his energies, time, and thought to the solution of complicated problems that defied contemporary experimenters. He proved an indispensable colleague to Professor Marey, which the author of Movement did not fail to acknowledge. So far as France is concerned, he rightly deserves to be regarded as the pioneer in cinematography. He not only photographed motion, but he reproduced it upon the screen, and devised an ingenious camera and projector to achieve his end.

M. Georges Demeny was forestalled in Great Britain by Messrs. Greene and Evans, who produced a chronophotographic apparatus which they patented in June, 1889, wherein the film was drawn intermittently before the lens for exposure. Two months previously, in April, 1889, another inventor, Stern, had filed a patent also, and these constitute the first intimation at the British Patent Office of the pending developments in cinematography. Neither issued beyond the experimental and model stage, for the simple reason that they were not reliable in their operation. There was no satisfactory mechanical means for moving the sensitised surfaces forward an equal distance after each exposure, and this omission of an indispensable feature proved fatal to their success.