Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1899	Chapter Nineteen 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty 1911 +	Copyright
HOTDOC Internet Archive Channel	HOTDOC X Channel	HOTDOC You Tube Channel

_{Period: 1870-1879}

The Thomas Ross Wheel of Life Magic Lantern Slide concluded the last chapter.

The recreation of motion entertainment in a multitude of forms is highlighting the final decades of the 19th century as the possibility of fluid cinematography steals the imagination of the world.

The age of motion study analysis begins with the work of men like Marey, Muybridge, Janssen, Holmes and others.

Richard Maddox presents the gelatin dry-plate process of photography which is now the fastest process known. Edison announces his Phonograph and Reynaud his Praxinoscope.

The Zoopraxiscope will soon be used to show painted images from photographs taken of Stanford’s champion trotter Occident. And the filly Sallie Gardner will become our first equine film star while proving that horses can indeed fly.

Instantaneous photography has arrived.
Celluloid is on the doorstep.
And Cine-photography is right around the corner.

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“we should not forget the originators, however brilliant the improvers“

^{– Helmut Gernsheim, The History of Photography, 1969, p442.}

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And here, just one example of possibly hundreds in the last decade, of Marey’s motion capturing technique being used in the modern age to capture motion images in the camera, and now adapted in it’s exact form into todays filmmaking.

Called image capture or motion or performance capture, Marey’s technique is shown and explained in this how-did-they-do-it production of Alita: Battle Angel, 20th Century Fox/James Cameron (2019).

The only comment I have about this Cameron / Landau / Rodriguez behind the scene look, is that they make no mention about Marey being the father of motion and performance capture. This is unfortunate.

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Sequenced photographs fascinated Marey.

A purely physiological study of animal movements turned into I think, a captivation with motion photography. Horses, rabbits and shirtless men punching the air was the work, but children skipping rope may have been the fun part. The realisation that there was more to this Chronophotography, than just physiology.

In a letter to Gaston Tissandier editor of La Nature referencing Muybridge, Marey asked for his help.

He wrote;

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These illustrations of Marey’s one-plate one-lens camera are from Moving Pictures – How They Are Made and Worked by Frederick A. Talbot, published by William Heinemann, London, in 1912 on pp16 and 19. READ it here at Internet Archive.

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Two excerpts reporting on Marey’s projection Chronophotography;

Left- Marta Braun Picturing Time- The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1992 on p173.
Right- Helmut Gernsheim The History of Photography, from The Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, 1969 on p442.

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Towards the end of his life, Marey focused on abstract forms in his study of movements using Stop Action Series Photography. One of them being smoke trails.

Zoopraxiscope disk Monkey Climbing Palm Tree animation as seen through the Zoopraxiscope.

Did Leland Stanford want to wager on whether a monkey’s paws left the ground when climbing a coconut palm?

The Phantasmagoria, which dates back to the 1770s in Europe, was a sort of horror theatre presentation that used several of the early moving image Magic Lanterns to create a pretty scary and immersive audience experience.

Images of terror and horror were projected even before the Phantasmagoria took root in the late 1700s, with the appearance of our earliest-known Magic Lantern from Johannes Fontana in 1420. Fontana was known to put on his own hell raisers.

The Magic Lantern of the Phantasmagorie in French, was known as a Fantoscope and sometimes with two lenses, waxed sheets, clear slides to project images onto wafting smoke or onto a hanging translucent screen. More than one lantern was used by the serious professional.

The well known names attached to this horror spectacle were Paul Phillidor, Johann Georg Schröpfer and Étienne-Gaspard Robertson.

As Robertson said in his Memoires;

“I am only satisfied if my spectators, shivering and shuddering, raise their hands or cover their eyes out of fear of ghosts and devils dashing towards them“

Like most technology of any age, it will finally come to an end or be improved on and morph into something closely related. Like simple magic tricks, audiences came to understand that Napoleon wasn’t returned from the dead, and their grandfather wasn’t walking around as a skeleton.

The Phantasmagoria lives on even today in a variety of ways.

Dickens and Carroll have seen to that, along with Disney’s Haunted Mansion and certain video games. And let’s not forget the common horror film, spawned by the Phantasms themselves.

As Paul Phillidor said at the beginning of the evening performances;

“I pretend to be neither priest nor magician; I have no wish to deceive you; but I know how to astonish you”

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1870
THE PHASMATROPE MYSTERY PROJECTION
One of the more intriguing periods in my look at pre cinema are the months of February and March in 1870. His name was Henry Heyl and his device was the Phasmatrope.

I have both sides of this mystery.  Let’s take a look.

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Heyl gave us the Phasmatrope, combining photographs on a disk & producing an illusion of motion. Styled from a Magic Lantern for projection, an entirely synthetic illusion of posed images is said to have resulted.

But who makes a device like this only to have it sit unused? Of course you take it out and present it. Especially in 1870 when the race to cinema is on.

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Perhaps in fact, used indeed. Historical author of pre cinema Charles Musser seems to think there was a projection of dancers. From page 47 of his book The Emergence of Cinema here are what he called “Heyl’s dancers,” clearly posed and not in true or accurate sequence. And on the very next page, Musser tells us where the pictures “were made.”

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Here we read what patrons would have either seen posted or have received personally, from a printed programme of the event at the Academy of Music 5 February, and published in the Popular Science Monthly of July 1898 by Appleton. It reads;

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Here is the letter written by Heyl published in the Franklin Institute Journal of April 1898, Volume CXLV, Issue 4, pp310, 311.

Thanks to Leigh-Anne Yacovelli, Library Services Manager, The Franklin Institute for digging this up for me.

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As late as the 1915 edition seen on the right, Hopwood & Foster state the Phasmatrope “was exhibited” at the Academy of Music in February 1870 on p52 and was “very successful.”

The original first edition in 1899 seen on the left, on page 47 states the same, as “very successful…” So what is going on here.

It appears that this presentation did take place.

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in those days, the race to cinema was a ruthless business

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Enter Deac Rossell, a deep dive and well respected historian extraordinaire and some of his work, like The Public Exhibition of Moving Pictures before 1896, Deac Rossell: Choosing a Different Perspective, p180.

Please read;

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So, after all this we still have Rossell in his Chronology of Moving Picture Exhibition before 1896, pp23-38, documenting that the two presentations did happen.

So, is this a simple change of mind based on modern research? While ignoring contemporary research?

Perhaps time will tell.

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ONE LAST THOUGHT
Coleman Sellers invented the Peep Show Kinematoscope. I spoke about Sellers in the previous chapter thirteen. He used posed pictures as did Heyl.

Sellers was elected head of the Franklin Institute at the very same meeting where the Phasmatrope event was not logged into the minutes.

Could Sellers have had something to do in this lack of credibility for Heyl? These two men had an interest in motion entertainment, clearly. Even though the Kinematoscope was a simple Victorian-age children’s optical single-viewer toy, would he have had reason to feel competitive towards Heyl? And thereby keep him out of recorded history even if it was only the institute’s minutes?

Both machines would have had separate markets; one being a toy and the other a projecting lantern for a large audience. From everything I’ve read neither man had any animosity towards the other.

Business can be funny that way I guess. In a funny kind of way. One thing to consider; in those days, the race to cinema was a ruthless business.

Read Gordon Hendrick’s book The Edison Motion Picture Myth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962, or just ask Lizzie Le Prince.

This device had a foldable lid with a single lens for viewing engravings or other single images, alongside its Stereoscopic capabilities with adjustable lenses and a frosted glass screen. Unknown manufacturer. French origin. Varnished wood, mother-of-pearl inlay, ivory, brass. Three-inch diametre lens. Cabinet holds 200 viewing plates.

19TH CENTURY MOTION ILLUSION TOYS
Henry Hopwood called them “penny street novelties.” These very simple optical amusements came & went like a flash of lightning.

But while they were here, gave a sense of hope for things to come while building a foundation for motion on a screen.

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SEE the La Toupe Fantoche from 1897 in action here in what would give children hours of fun while teaching simple optics. A Victorian optical toy that children could marvel at. Runs 1:05.

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it provided a moving image on exactly the same principles as Plateau’s Phenakistoscope

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1870
JACQUES DESIRE FENAUT (1832-1909)
Fenaut manufactured Magic Lanterns and in particular, an Episcope that was illuminated by the sun. A mirror on the outside lit the interior to project a very strong image. Images from Ernst Plank c. 1880. The Magic Lantern UK website has a pdf article by Laurent Mannoni that includes Jacques Désiré Fenaut being in Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine) in 1877, making a “solar lantern for opaque objects,” i.e., an Episcope (an opaque projector in the Magic-Lantern family). He styled himself a dealer/maker of optical apparatus Mannoni tells us.

^{Images de Luikerwaal}

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Modern compilations echo this, noting Fenaut’s sun-illuminated Episcope with an external mirror to throw light onto the object, again placing him squarely in lantern/Episcope work in the late 1870s. The Episcope is a very simple Magic Lantern for projecting flat opaque images. It can project photographs, prints, or most 3D objects such as a coin or a key.

Objects are placed upside down at the rear and the image appears upright because of the projecting lens.

^{Images de Luikerwaal}

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Some the most famous, well made and popular Lanterns and slides were made by Gebrüder Bing of optical town of Nuremberg.

^{Images de Luikerwaal}

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These four black Episcopes that I have pictured in all, are c. 1900 and manufactured by the Bing brothers, a German toy maker started 1863 in Nuremberg.

Also seen is the Gebrüder Bing logo.

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A 19th century Magic Lantern presentation of the Wise Men of the East is depicted in this image that I originally received from the late world-renowned collector of Magic Lanterns and ML accessories, Jack Judson of the Magic Lantern Castle Museum in San Antonio.

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION. AN ELECTRO-PHOTOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF CONSECUTIVE PHASES OF ANIMAL MOVEMENTS
Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1885. Published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1887.

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1870s
BRONZE SAVOYARD FIGURINES
This very unusual pair of 19th-century bronze figurines border on being rare. They depict a man with a Magic Lantern, with his wife playing the ‘old wheel’ (Hurdy-Gurdy, vielle a roue or just vielle)  for musical accompaniment.

_{The François Binétruy Collection}

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According to the François Binétruy Collection, these two figurines are “one of the most beautiful bronze on this theme which, contrary to what is said in many works, does not date from the 18th century but from the 19th century.”

_{The François Binétruy Collection}

These bronzes were created by famed French sculptor Adolphe Jean Lavergne (1852-1901) c. 1870s or 1880s, yet they depict characters in the manner of an 18th century pre cinema theme.

Pictured here, a family of Savoyards from the mountains of Savoy, 1800.

c. 1871
LIONEL SMITH BEALE (1828-1906)
THE ANIMATION OF A FACE ON A BUST USING A THINGAMAJIG
Beale, of whom I have spoken of before regarding his Choreutoscope, created a method to allow a face to be presented as if moving through a succession of sixteen images lit by sporadic flashes. How this was done is not elaborated on. But I can imagine . . . . ..

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Not having any images to show, we must picture something like this:

🎦 an image of a human bust is seen on a screen
🎦 the face being cut out to create a faceless space like an oval
🎦 behind that space are sixteen images of a face in the various stages of frowns and sneers, sequentially prepared
🎦 a disk with the 16 funny faces on the circumference, revolves

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A sixteen-holed shutter worked by gearing, emits a flash of light to illuminate each face for a moment as each arrives in its proper position. The light is turned out intermittently between each expression.

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All this by means of an ingenious thingamajig I have named for lack of any other name provided, which allowed only every alternate opening in the shutter to act.

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This thingamajig repeated these actions with adequate speed to throw an apparently moving face on the bust. Whether Beale built it or patented it is unknown by me. The search goes on.

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This is an excerpt from The Art of Projections, 1872 by François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno, on his outlook on how the Magic Lantern could be used to teach;

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1872
PETTIBONE ROTATING WHEEL LANTERN
The Sciopticon Revolving Wheel Magic Lantern became the James Pettibone preeminent lantern not long after opening in 1872. They made several different models.

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notice that one of the ten lantern slides is in fact a commercial

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In order to stoke the fires of business, Pettibone disks came with some advertising. Notice that one of the ten lantern slides is in fact a commercial.

Just when you thought going back in time 152 years was safe and you could free yourself from all the marketing of 2024.

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Another advertisement showing the Pettibone building where the slides you’re enjoying were manufactured. Even today our free streaming has ads embedded throughout the program, or pop-up ads whether it’s a subscription, commercial TV or PPV.

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The Sciopticon was patented in 1888 and projected images painted on glass originally using candle light for illumination, then oil burners or kerosene and finally electrical light from 1890 on.

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This Pettibone Revolving Lantern shown here in five angled photographs with accessories, is owned by the producer of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, 1983, Howard Kazanjian. Images the Howard Kazanjian Collection.

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In the United States at the end of the 1870s, one could see in certain places of worship Pastors using the Magic Lantern to enhance the message.

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these framed automatons help us make that jump from the painted picture, to the moving screen

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With the help of counterbalancing weights behind the lithograph background, Clockwork Animated Living Pictures had a fan serving as a governor, mounted on the axle at high speed, while scenes are animated by a belt-driven cam from a slow-moving shaft in the clockwork.

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SEE this Clockwork Animated Living Picture by Albert Schoenhut of the old gent swatting the mouse here.

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“Other patterns for living pictures were provided to be cut out and animated according to the pleasure of the assembler.”

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In 1866 at age 17 Schoenhut sailed to the United States. In 1872 he began manufacturing toy pianos in a workshop in Philadelphia. His Clockwork Animated Living Pictures soon followed and today they are prized by collectors, connoisseurs, and aficionados around the world.

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SEE this Clockwork Animated Living Picture by Albert Schoenhut of the Photographer and the troublesome boy who refuses to sit still, here. These framed automatons help us make that jump from the painted picture, to the moving screen.

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SEE how the back of the Albert Schoenhut Clockwork Animated Living Picture appears in operation here in this short video.

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Lastly, SEE another Albert Schoenhut Clockwork Animated Living Picture called A Good Joke.

By 1872 we’ve come a long way through the history of what happened before Cinematography. And we’ve still got a way to go.

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Du Hauron worked on both the subtractive and additive methods of colour photography during the 1860’s and later published his findings in a paper he titled Les Couleurs en Photographie.

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This page below with illustration is taken from Hopkins book Magic – Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography p463.

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Muybridge’s investigations into the gate of a horse at the Sacramento racetrack were inconclusive.

However, the resulting pictures taken as the trotting horse raced past, were the beginning of what would become known as stop-action series photography.

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This photograph shows the front of the Electro-Mechanical Shutters Muybridge devised and used, with before (l), during (c) and post exposure (r) positions.

These are 3 of the 24 camera shutters with the centre one tripped.

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Muybridge’s final accomplishment was without celluloid, preceding the commercial films of the 1890’s by at least 16 years

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Here are four angles of one of Muybridge’s cameras used at the Palo Alto track. Housed at the George Eastman House, Rochester New York.

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Eadweard Muybridge not only photographed horses for motion study analysis but also other animals such as elephants, buffaloes, and birds, and also people including children.

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motion was being attempted around the world by various pioneers

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Muybridge took his Zoopraxiscope on tour with him many times throughout the world, sponsored by Stanford at first. Below, how the Zoopraxiscope would look in action.

^{Zoopraxiscope animation by Charl Lucassen}

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SEE a Street Zoopraxiscope in action, in an urban landscape. The pictures never move. There are no glass plates, no film, no projector. Just photos of the Stanford horse Annie G. and her rider, you in your car, and your retina.

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SEE all 781 plates of Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (volume III) sequenced images from the 1887 Animal Locomotion from the University of Pennsylvania here at Internet Archive.

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In 1881 Blair went to Boston, and Darius L. Goff, a Rhode Island textile industrialist financed Blair Tourograph, approving the production of the daylight-loading Kamaret Roll Camera seen here on the left, in 1891.

Goff also financed a full line of photographic dry plates and equipment.

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Blair opened branches in Cincinnati, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. During these approximate 10 years, Blair and Eastman were involved in a succession of drawn-out patent clashes.

Below is Blair’s Utility Camera Variation #2 from 1890.

^{Image Larry S. Pearce}

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On the left is an illustration of Blair’s Utility Camera Variation #1 with a rear focus screw, from his catalogue The Blair Tourograph & Dry Plate Company, Boston, MA, c. 1884, on p4.

Right, the actual camera.

^{Images Larry S. Pearce}

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In 1893 Blair moved to England and established the European Blair Camera Company. By September 1896 virtually all of Edison’s film was from Blair Tourograph. This included all film that ran through a Kinetoscope.

Below, Blair’s Tremont Outfit 1893.

^{Images Larry S. Pearce}

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Blair began supplying his film to the Lumières, George Albert Smith, Birt Acres, Robert Paul and Charles Urban’s European interests.

Illustration: a front focus collapsing design Bellows Camera from the Blair Tourograph and Dry Plate Company catalogue, 1884, p12.

^{Images Larry S. Pearce}

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George Eastman began to produce celluloid roll film with a clear base and Eastman later obtained the full Blair operation absorbing it into the new Eastman Kodak Company. Thomas Henry Blair wasn’t just another name in dusty photo history books. He was a legit innovator—offering portable solutions and fueling the earliest movie industry with actual film stock. Yet, his stubborn fight with Kodak meant that today, he’s barely a footnote compared to Eastman.

Blair Roller-Blind Shutter, 1890 below. Blair passed away in Massachusetts, 1919.

^{Images Larry S. Pearce}

1873
SELENIUM AND LIGHT SENSITIVITY
HONOURABLE MENTION
WILLOUGHBY SMITH (1828–1891)
Smith is not a household name, but he was a critical figure in 19^th century electrical science. He was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, UK and had a career as an electrical engineer, mainly involved with submarine telegraphy and cables. He was a major player in the laying of the transatlantic and other submarine cables.

Smith was testing materials for use in insulating underwater telegraph cables in 1873 when he experimented with selenium rods because selenium was known to be a poor conductor. To his surprise, he found that selenium’s electrical resistance decreased when exposed to light and increased again in darkness. He reported the results in 1873 in the Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers. This was the first observation of photoconductivity in a solid material. His discovery directly influenced early photoelectric cells and light-sensitive devices. It underpinned later inventions like the selenium cell, used in early light metres and photo telegraphy systems.

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These are a few examples of what Selenium is used in today.

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ON THE FAR EDGE OF PRE CINEMA SCIENCE
His work paved the way for optical communication research, and though not pre cinema itself, it forms part of the scientific chain leading to television and photoelectric imaging. His discovery was quickly picked up by contemporaries, including Werner von Siemens, who refined selenium cells.

While Smith didn’t experiment with moving images, his work introduced light-sensitive electronics which is a concept without which cinema’s later electrical and television-based technologies could not have emerged. In a way, he sits at the far edge of pre cinema science, bridging optics and electro-communication. Suddenly, light could be turned into an electrical signal, a key principle for any kind of television. William Siemens and others immediately speculated about using selenium to send visual information, not just static images but possibly “moving” ones.

1873
THE BUSCH LIQUID FILLED PARLOUR KALEIDOSCOPE
CHARLES GUSTAVUS BUSCH (1825-1900)
Busch was a notable 19^th century Prussian-born American who made significant contributions as a Kaleidoscope manufacturer, microscopist, and inventor. Born in Colberg, Prussia (now Kołobrzeg, Poland), he initially trained in his father’s rope-making business after attending local schools. Busch emigrated to the US in 1847. He settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he established a successful rope-making business. His use of the microscope to study rope fibre led him to the Kaleidoscope of Brewster. He later became a photographer and during this time he created the Liquid-filled Parlour Kaleidoscope.

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His expertise in microscopy fueled his fascination with optics, prompting him to study telescopes, Kaleidoscopes, and photography. Busch was the 1st person to mass manufacture a Parlour Kaleidoscope in the US. The Busch Kaleidoscopes were distinguished by the use of liquid-filled glass ampules, various coloured liquids, shards, glass bubbles, and twisted glass to create even more visually stunning effects. His company, C. G. Bush (now Anglicised) and Company, based in Providence, Rhode Island, produced thousands of Kaleidoscopes, which were highly sought after in various markets.

Busch’s Liquid-filled Parlour Kaleidoscope included hermetically sealed liquid-filled glass ampules as objects in the Kaleidoscope’s viewing tube. These ampules contained liquids, such as glycerin or mineral oil, with air bubbles that continued to move even after the object case was at rest, creating dynamic and visually striking patterns. This was a distinctive feature of Busch’s designs, setting them apart from earlier Kaleidoscopes that primarily used solid objects like glass shards or beads.

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Busch had a basic mix of about 35 pieces of glass, a third of which were liquid filled. Inside the liquids were air bubbles. These liquid-filled glass-piece Kaleidoscopes were the finest of any 19th century Kaleidoscope. This was the notable Kaleidoscope, inscribed with “C. G. Bush & Co. / Prov. R.I. / Patent Reissued / Nov. 11, 1873,” now part of the National Museum of American History’s collection. Busch held a US patent № 143271, issued 30 September 1872, and reissued 11 November 1873 for “improvements in Kaleidoscope objects,” assigned to himself and J. W. Hoard of Providence.

While Sir David Brewster’s 1819 treatise on Kaleidoscopes mentioned the potential for “differently moving fluids enclosed in small vessels of glass” as objects, Busch is credited with being the first to successfully implement and patent this concept in the United States, making his liquid-filled ampules a hallmark of his Parlour Kaleidoscopes.

^{Images The Henry Ford}

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In May 1900, Busch travelled to Claremont, Vermont, to manage the disposition of his workroom items. There, he contracted pneumonia and died on 19 May 1900, just four days after falling ill. Busch’s legacy lies in his transition from a skilled tradesman to a celebrated figure in optics and Kaleidoscope manufacturing, blending scientific curiosity with entrepreneurial success. His work not only advanced the craft of Kaleidoscope production but also reflected his broader contributions to microscopy and optical innovation in 19^th century America.

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These instruments, often mounted on a mahogany stand with a cardboard tube covered in black pebbled paper and brass fittings, contained a mix of about 35 objects, roughly a third of which were liquid-filled, alongside solid glass pieces like rods, twists, or the rare swan-embossed disk. The liquid-filled ampules produced unique, ever-changing patterns, contributing to their popularity and collectible status today.

SEE an original Busch Liquid-filled Parlour Kaleidoscope in near pristine condition from Kaleidoscopes to You @KaleidoscopesToYou on YT.

1873 
EADWEARD JAMES MUYBRIDGE (1830 – 1904)
Muybridge publishes over 2,000 photographs of the far western US in his Catalogue of Photographic Views. His photos showed famous American landmarks in their pristine state.

In April of 1873 the Daily Alta California reported that Muybridge had photographed the horse Occident, owned by Governor Leland Stanford.

The newspaper stated in the story that Muybridge’s photographs had in fact shown the animal “frozen” in mid stride.

Word will quickly spread around the US and then the world, of what Muybridge’s work was actually proving – that horses leave the ground, and that recorded motion was possible.

Without identifying Muybridge by name, the New York Times will report in May of 1873 that  “A San Francisco photographer is declared to have obtained a perfect likeness of the horse Occident going at full speed.” 

Muybridge had taken a path that would lead directly towards an art form that would cause landscape photography to pale in comparison. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

Janssen’s invention is considered a key milestone in the development of Chronophotography and a precursor to modern cinematography.

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The setup included two discs: one with 12 radial shutter slits rotating four times faster than the sensitive plate, which had a single slit, ensuring non-overlapping images.

A heliostat (a clockwork mirror tracking the Sun) directed light into the telescope, which was connected to the revolver.

Janssen chose Daguerreotype plates, despite their obsolescence by 1874, because they minimized halation (flare) compared to glass plates and were suitable for the bright sunlight, requiring no complex wet-plate process.

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Janssen was fully aware that in 1874 moving sequenced pictures were possible and in fact, being accomplished by several around the world

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Janssen presented the revolver to the Société Française de Photographie in 1875 and the Académie des Sciences in 1876, suggesting its use for studying rapid movements, like bird flight. His work inspired British expeditions, which used similar Janssen devices, and laid groundwork for motion picture technology.

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^{Images Stephen Herbert, The Optilogue}

Pictured is the Janssen sequence camera, with photographs taken on a single Daguerreotype plate disk. Janssen’s camera was never meant to photograph motion. But motion we have. The revolver photographique physically and functionally combines three prior inventions:

🎞️  the pistol for its ability to fire repeatedly
🎞️  the camera for its ability to photograph
🎞️  the Phenakistiscope for how it stores pictures around a disk

The plate moved 48 times intermittently, during a revolution. Plates from Roorkee, India, and Thebes, Egypt, attributed to Janssen’s method, exist in collections like the Royal Museums Greenwich. These are often photopositives or copies, with the Roorkee plate showing 60 exposures (possibly enlarged) and the Thebes plate showing 48.

Their status as practice or actual transit images remains uncertain.

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On the left is the same transit seen from Luxor Egypt on 9 December taken by William de Wiveleslie Abney, and on the right the Janssen disk with all 48 frames. If you look closely you can see Venus in each frame. Look for the dot.

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Here from Hopwoods Living Pictures, pp 57, 58, 59 we read a detailed operation of the Janssen camera and on page 59, how E. J. Marey modelled his Photographic Gun after the Janssen camera.

An 1875 illustration in La Nature by Barthélemy Bonnafoux depicts the revolver in use, emphasizing its cannon-like appearance. The device’s images, when animated, offer a proto cinematic glimpse of Venus’s motion, as seen in modern reconstructions like the one I provided in the first post.

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Janssen led a team to Nagasaki, Japan, with two members observing from Kobe.

The French government supported the expedition, one of over 60 global missions to observe the transit. Despite intermittent cloud cover, Janssen reported success in capturing images.

The Photographic Revolver is recognized as the first practical device for sequential photography, influencing later Chronophotographic work by figures like Étienne-Jules Marey, who adapted it for studying animal motion.

It’s often cited as an embryonic form of the movie camera, though Janssen’s intent was scientific, not cinematic.

Janssen is seated in the centre.

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Janssen’s Photographic Revolver, while not achieving its full astronomical aim, marked a technological leap, bridging astronomy and the origins of cinema. See an historical account like Françoise Launay’s The Astronomer Jules Janssen or the Journal for the History of Astronomy (2005) for highly detailed account of the event.

Here is a still photograph Janssen took of the transit of Venus across the sun, he called Passage de Venus (1874).

Janssen photographed Venus from Japan.

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Once his photography was finished, Janssen cabled from Nagasaki that “Venus observed on corona before contact, demonstrating the existence of the corona.”  Camille Flammarion, the famous stargazer remarked on this news from Japan stating;

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Janssen had started designing and building his photographic revolver a year earlier in 1873, delegating its ultimate creation to the manufacturer of all things that kept time, the famed Parisian clock maker Antoine Redier.

The external appearance of the photographic revolver is more like a cannon or a howitzer than a revolver, which referred to the revolving barrel Colt Paterson pistol invented and patented by the American Samuel Colt in 1836. The photographic revolver was described by Janssen himself;

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The Janssen revolver photographique was inspired by the revolving cylinder of Samuel Colt’s revolver invented and patented in 1836. Some say Pierre Jules César Janssen initiated Chronophotography in 1874 with his transit, an office of photography grounded on the arresting of moving images in an intelligent sequence.

Lay people as we are, let’s take a look at how these designs compare and see if we can see what Janssen saw.

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Back in Paris, Janssen wrote;

“The photographic revolver I have the honour of presenting, creates the following conditions:”

🎦  the instrument currently gives forty-eight images and this number could probably be doubled or even trebled
🎦  the time of an exposure is determined by the same instrument and can be regulated
🎦  the interval separating the images can be increased or decreased at will
🎦  the instrument is automatic, i.e. it creates the series of images on its own, with no intervention required by the operator
🎦  if desired, the instrument can be controlled manually and, in this case, create the images at those intervals of time that are judged to be appropriate

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You will recall the work of Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639, observing a similar astronomical event exactly two hundred and thirty five years earlier, except in Horrox’s case, without the ability to capture the image of what he saw.

1874
CADWELL’S REVOLVING STEREOSCOPE
JONATHAN W. (WESLEY?) CADWELL (1826-1893?)
Cadwell was a 19^th century Massachusetts inventor and manufacturer who produced a patented Revolving Stereoscope (6 January, 1874, №146164) and marketed it under names like “Cadwell’s Revolving Stereoscope” or “J. W. Cadwell & Sons” out of North Reading.

The device shows up in museum and catalogue records and stereoview collector literature as an octagonal wooden box-viewer with two lens openings and a hinged viewing panel. The interior contains a rotating / advancing mechanism operated by knobs on the sides that indexes a stack or drum of stereographs so the user can step through many views without remounting cards. This Revolving Stereoscope was made to hold up to 100 views (50 cards mounted back-to-back).

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Cadwell’s original patent in 1873 for his Stereoscope Viewer was not octagonal. Original patent clipping image below is from the National Stereoscopic Association’s StereoWorld newsletter dated November-December 1977.

Research indicates the product was sold as J. W. Cadwell and Sons and that the name N. A. Cadwell appears on some labels, probably the son. It’s a mechanical indexing Stereoscope, a class of viewers that became common in the 1860s to 1880s, but Cadwell packaged the mechanism attractively in his second patent of 1874 as a parlour ornamental octagonal cabinet that concealed the mechanics.

Original 1873 Cadwell Stereoscope images WorthPoint.

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A practical detail that collectors point out. The Smithsonian’s Patent-Model indexes list Cadwell’s patent among the Patent Model entries for 1874.

Images shown with permission from Keita Wangari at Vintage 3D Viewers.

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This little girl is looking into the first Cadwell Stereoscope of 1873. The caption printed on the card reads ” Oh! Oh? Oh!” and is quite likely because she’s looking at the same Stereoview you’re looking at─of herself. This image was originally published by E. & H. T. Anthony. Standard-size Stereograph, measuring 3.5″ x 7.”

_{Image WorthPoint}

I’ve found multiple reliable secondary confirmations (museum catalog entries, StereoWorld articles, patent-model indexes) and several collector and auction records describing surviving Cadwell viewers but I didn’t find a clean, digitized copy of the original patent specification image / text in the standard patent databases.

Four Cadwell 1874 Revolving Stereoscope Viewers from Winter Associates.

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William Friese-Greene will be intrigued by the Phantascope and what he saw from Rudge’s work

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The Phantascope consisted of seven photographic slides, which were all posed. The subject appeared to remove his own head from off his shoulders through the tricky work of the photographer or darkroom shenanigans.

Rudge used a circular lamp surrounded by a revolving drum which when turned quickly by a handle-crank, the slides would equally turn quite fast giving the appearance of the ghostly deed.

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Still later, Rudge manufactured another lantern; this one containing four lenses each projecting a photo-slide in sequence. Motion was imitated by a mirrored-shutter redirecting the light source onto each slide as it passed.

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This is Rudge’s projector diagram and description from the article Remarkable Novelties in Photographic Instruments, published by the Photographic News on 30 May 1890 found at Google Books but provided through the kindness of the late Stephen Herbert at The Optilogue.

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John Arthur Roebuck Rudge played by Cecil Trouncer, and William Friese-Greene played by Robert Donat, were portrayed in the 1951 Festival Film Production of The Magic Box produced by Ronald Neame.

It also starred the Rudge projector or Phantascope.

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Only two are known to exist, if this is true, as I have seen some in several auction houses and one in the late Richard Balzer’s possession. Nonetheless, this old-as-dirt pre cinema theatrical optical device was designed to project animated shadows “in Silhouette” onto the surrounding panels using cut-outs, candles, and an impeller as the Chinese did way back when Joseph Needham was researching the ancient optical culture of the orient.

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DISCREPANCY IN PATENT ASSIGNMENT
This moving shadow lantern was apparently granted patent in the US on 19 October 1875 under the name “Gyrating Shadow Lanterne” to the McLoughlin Brothers as I have seen in several sources. However, I have yet to see the patent itself under the McLoughlin name. And, according to patent examiner, researcher and author @PeterisSkorovs, “the official gazette of the US Patent Office from 1875 shows no mentioning of McLoughlin, neither as an inventor nor as an assignee. However, there is a patent that appears related to ‘Gyrating Shadow Lantern,’ US Patent № 168020, entitled ‘Improvement in toys’, and granted to Joseph Porter Michaels from New York (living in Vienna, Austria).”

_{Images courtesy Peteris Skorovs}

Skorovs suggests the patent to Michaels “probably, was licensed or assigned to McLoughlin later.” I have not been able to locate a patent assigned to the McLoughlin Brothers and only through the help of Skorovs do we see the patent schematics I’m showing here, by Joseph Porter Michaels.

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The Gyrating Shadow Lantern of the McLoughlin Brothers shown in the following images, is a complete replication of the Ting Huan entry of the first century BC, during the Han Dynasty, when in his Pipe Which Makes Fantasies Appear uncovered by Joseph Needham in 1962, we read that “the ascending convection of hot air from a lamp caused animals and creatures to appear to move naturally” [Science and Civilization in China, vol. IV, part 1: Physics and Physical Technology. Cambridge University Press. p. 123-124].

This is perhaps the first account of the marriage of both illumination and movement, created by the same source (lamp). The Zoetrope-esque lamp, which included a thin canopy with vanes at the top rotated due to an upward circulation of warm air from the lamp. The canopy contained primitive cut-out paper images that, when turned by the current of air, provided the appearance of movement, similar to early forerunners of the cinematograph.

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Further examples of illumination and movement are mentioned in the Meng Liang Lu written by the Chinese scholars Chiang Khuei and Fang Chheng during the Sung dynasty. In poetic form they describe “how the horses prance around after the lamp is lit.” Similar entries tell “how the smoke gives life and spirit to the figures in the ‘lanthorn’ where they seem to walk, turn, ascend and descend.”  These celebrated incidents in Chinese culture are referred to by both Hangchow (1275 A.D.) who also talks of the “flying dragons” and Gabriel Magalhaens (c.1650).

Joseph Needham again makes reference to modern writers like Tun Li-Cchen;

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Returning to the Gyrating Shadow Lantern of the McLoughlin Brothers, a four-panel screen acts as the projection surface. Each panel has delicate scenic decoration to enhance immersion. Suspended Silhouettes of figures and animals mounted on a ring suspended by chains, turn gently as the convection turns the impeller.

Candles serve a dual purpose: as a light source to cast moving shadows of the figures onto the screens: the rising heat convection turns the impeller which in turn, rotates the linked ring holding the figures. The cutouts are positioned to maximize shadow size and definition. As the figures rotate and the light flickers, shadows would stretch, warp, and dance on the side panels. I have seen both four and two candle versions.

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This device, reenacted in 1875, is part of what became a shadow revival trend in the 19th century, especially in France and Germany, where it was popular to revive ancient but simple optical toys that depicted animation. Almost as if they were newly invented and never known of. The Gyrating Shadow Lantern of the McLoughlin Brothers sits in lineage with The Chinese shadow play tradition, the Théâtre d’Ombres, Le Chat Noir, and Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique, in its use of motion and illusion. As simple a toy as it is, this is a pre cinematic tableau gem, blurring the line between domestic amusement and proto animation, utilising only a candle for it’s visual mobility.

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As Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak in their joint work Devices of Wonder (Getty Research Institute, 2001, pp73-74) state; “Both the Eleusinian phantoms and the Asian spectacles of boxed light captured an alternative floating world connected to popular religious practices.” They go on to tell us that James Christie (Christie’s auction house) remarked that “such lanterns were not only ornamented with shadowy paintings but further enlivened by the addition of certain small figures, cut out, and ingeniously moved on the side.”

They continue;

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WATCH an authentic Gyrating Shadow Lantern from 1875 being assembled and demonstrated by toy collector and designer Mel Birnkrant @BirnkrantMel with only two candles which does not produce enough heat convection to turn the impeller without assistance.

1875
HONOURABLE MENTION
CAREY’S SELENIUM CAMERA
GEORGE R. CAREY (1851-1906)
Carey proposed a system that could transmit images electrically using selenium’s photoconductive property (discovered by Willoughby Smith in 1873). His design was published in Scientific American in 1878, the same year Du Maurier spoofed the Edison Telephonoscope transmitter. The article opening states: “By consent of Mr. Carey we present herewith engravings and descriptions of his wonderful instruments.”

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The Scientific American article starts by comparing the state of image-transmission by electricity to the telephone in 1876, noting that Carey’s ideas are in a similarly early stage. His idea was to create instantaneous electrical photographs, essentially the first attempt at real-time electronic image transmission.

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Carey himself called it a “television”  even though the word was not yet coined, but the concept was identical. Historians often mark Carey as the first to describe a technically feasible, though impractical, two-dimensional electrical image transmitter.

Pictured are three hand drawn schematics by Carey of his proposal for a Selenium Camera, 1875.

Carey’s work is largely forgotten outside of specialist histories of television. Still, his 1875–77 proposals bridge Willoughby Smith’s selenium discovery and Nipkow’s scanning breakthrough, showing how quickly inventors leapt to the idea of moving pictures by electricity once photoelectricity was known.

Born in Leeds into a wealthy and politically active family, he trained as a barrister, but he had a restless intellect and a tendency to leap between projects. A radical libertarian/anarchist thinker in Victorian Britain, he was heavily involved in individualist anarchism, free-market economics, and anti-socialist politics. He co-founded the Liberty and Property Defence League with his cousin Wordsworth Ryland Adcock. Donisthorpe was a master-level chess player. He had a reputation for eccentric self-promotion, often over-claiming the originality of his inventions.

Regarding pre cinema, Donisthorpe described a strip of paper with photographs on it, that were equidistant. The strip would be wound from one cylinder to another and then seen through either the Phenakistoscope or Zoetrope.

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Patent No. 4236, in 1876 described a method for taking a sequence of still photographs on a sensitized strip of paper or film and then projecting them rapidly to create the illusion of motion. His early concept was mechanical but not fully practical in 1876 because photographic materials and precision mechanics weren’t yet advanced enough. The 1890 Trafalgar Square film, in collaboration with engineer William Carr Crofts, Donisthorpe made what is often cited as the earliest surviving moving picture shot of central London: about 10–12 frames showing traffic and pedestrians in Trafalgar Square. Shot with a later version of the Kinesigraph. It’s extremely brief but historically important for British cinema history. Donisthorpe claimed to have been working on motion picture ideas before Edison or Friese-Greene, and while there’s truth to his early patent, his practical results came later.

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Donisthorpe’s idea was called “wild, visionary and ridiculous and that the only result of attempting to photograph motion would be an indescribable blur.”

Newnes was discouraged from investing in this new medium as a result. Instead, he funded the Norwegian South Pole expedition in 1898.

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Here from the 12 March, 1897 issue of the British Journal of Photography, on p175 we read a portion of Donisthorpe’s letter to the editor on the Sir George Newnes belief that his two “experts” talked him out of backing the Kinesigraph, “the photography of motion.”

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“I shall ask in the future,” Donisthorpe said, “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.”

Below, a reconstructed Kinesigraph.

^{Images Stephen Herbert, The Race to Cinema}

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Here from Henry Hopwood’s Living Pictures on pp64, 67, 68, Donisthorpe and Crofts idea for their Kinesigraph fully explained;

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The 26 March, 1897 issue of the British Journal of Photography, commented on the Donisthorpe-Crofts Kinesigraph;

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“the only result of attempting to photograph motion would be an indescribable blur”

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Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph was a single lens camera that took pictures 2.5 inches in diametre on sensitized paper which later had castor oil (or petroleum jelly) applied to make it transparent.

Eastman tried this same idea in 1884 before perfecting his film base in 1889. Pictured are 6 schematics comprising Donisthorpe and Crofts patent № 452966 dated 26 May 1891, for a “method of producing instantaneous photographs.” The Kinesigraph.

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Even though Donisthorpe’s idea was not financially backed in 1876, he believed the continuous action of the moving lens providing the necessary intermittency, was a distinct advantage over other cameras.

He said;

1876
MOTION SEQUENCE PHOTOGRAPHS
JAMES ROSS (1815-1895)
Did James Ross of Edinburgh precede Eadweard Muybridge in producing motion sequence photography by two years? With Muybridge producing photographic sequences by June 1878, Ross may have done the same in July 1876.

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This article on Instantaneous Photography did appear in the British Journal of Photography on 14 July, 1876 on page 328.

This was almost two years before Muybridge photographed Occident and Sallie Gardner.

The above clipping is broken in two even though they are from the same page. Notice “The last is peculiarly interesting, as it was stated to be taken with a camera fitted with a number of medallion lenses, placed in threes, one above another.”

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Ross allegedly built a camera with a group of three lenses positioned vertically with an opening in a sheet passing the lenses in quick succession as it dropped, resulting in three separate photos.

These three photographs were named “A Boy Jumping Over a Large Stone.”

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“the first known of a photographic sequence that records a physical body in motion in real time”

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The British Journal article (pp 328, 329) stated; “the plate showed the three pictures in very different positions.” This of course indicates a distinct sequence.

The three images depicted the lad at three certain phases of the leap — “abundant evidence” that the author of the article actually had seen these photographs first hand. We do not have them today.

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According to pre cinema historian Deac Rossell, the British Journal claims this to be the “description of the first known of a photographic sequence that records a physical body in motion in real time” (Chronology of The Birth of Cinema 1833-1896, Rossell, pp31, 32).

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Ross and Thomson were awarded medals in the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. They specialised in studio portraitures throughout the 1850s and 1860s. James Ross later established a second business venture with Thomas Pringle.

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The Lampadorama consists of an opaque box whose lower and upper faces are pierced with holes that allow it to be placed on any two lamps whose globe-holders are at the same height.

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“he also reserves the possibility of moving the moving images by hand or by means of electricity or by the compression of air”

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An engraving here on the right from the book Au Random du Chemin by M. and Mme. Satanislas Meunier – J. Rothschild publisher in Paris 13 rue des Saint-Pères. c. 1886. Close up of the Lampadorama on the left.

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The device is transformed into a Magic Lantern in the following way: the opaque object is replaced by reflecting mirrors which return the light towards the opening of the anterior wall in front of which there is a groove allowing to place the transparent images.

The Lampadorama illustration from the Lefevre schematic in his patent is also seen here, and is taken from La Pratique Des Projections by H. Fourtier, published in 1892, and found on p46.

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Henri Lefevre also specifies the different uses of his Lampascope and announces, twenty years in advance, the advent of the “images with movements” Cinematograph.

On his prophecy he went on to say;

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Three pages from the patent (including illustrations) of Henri Alexandre Lefevres fifteen-year request for a “double-effect” Magic Lantern called a Lampadorama or Lampascope.

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Descriptive posters of the Lefevre Magic Lantern called the Lampadorama.

1877
THE RÉTINASCOPE
CHARLES-ÉMILE REYNAUD (1844-1918)
The Rétinascope is a deeply obscure, rarely discussed, seldom if ever seen, but fascinating precursor to his better-known Praxinoscope of the same year, and his Théâtre Optique of 1888. The Rétinascope is constantly overlooked in histories of pre cinema, partly because Reynaud himself did not promote it widely, and because little physical or visual documentation survives.

But it reveals key insights into Reynaud’s early thinking on retinal persistence, or as it’s called today, Apparent Motion, optical sequencing, and psychological illusion. The Rétinascope (literally retina viewer) appears to have been an experimental device Reynaud constructed in early 1877, before finalizing the Praxinoscope design later that year.

It was not meant to be a commercial product and was possibly shown only in private demonstrations or lectures. Based on rare references (including Reynaud’s unpublished notes and later writings), the device combined:

📌 Sequential image exposure on a rotating drum or disc

📌A viewing slot or eyepiece for isolating vision

📌 Rapid alternation of stills, exploiting retinal persistence (Apparent Motion)

📌 Possibly shuttered illumination (mechanical or manual) to create momentary flashes—similar to a Phenakistiscope strobe or Plateau’s work

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Is it fair to say that without the Rétinascope, the Praxinoscope might not have emerged?

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Unlike the Praxinoscope, it did not use mirrors, which implies it was about perceptual science, not refined illusion. I don’t know what the original images were that were used, but Reynaud referred to “figures in motion,” perhaps human or animal movement broken into steps. He may have used shuttered light or intermittent exposure, echoing Faraday or Plateau’s disk experiments.

I’m thinking the Rétinascope was part science demo, part optical experiment. Reynaud it turns out, was obsessed with how images linger on the retina and how illusion arises from mechanical precision aligned with human perception. His device probably aimed to:

👁️ Visually prove Apparent Motion

👁️ Test timing thresholds for when “flicker” becomes “flow”

👁️ Study the relationship between image sequencing and mental continuity

From its description, I believe the Rétinascope resembled a didactic precursor to the Praxinoscope, meant to understand illusion before using it for entertainment.

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Is it fair to say that without the Rétinascope, the Praxinoscope might not have emerged?

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These animations are not from the Rétinascope, but from Praxinoscope strips. Because the Rétinascope was a precursor to his Praxinoscope and an experimental device, its images may have looked similar if not identical.

Reynaud’s 1900 memoirs (manuscript form from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) briefly reference the Rétinascope as a “preliminary instrument.” Jean-Louis Capitaine’s 1930s notes (archived in Lyon) make a reference “Appareil pour la persistance rétinienne – Reynaud 1877.”

No known surviving physical device exists. The term Rétinascope was not reused by Reynaud, and it should not be confused with the medical instrument of the same name.

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the American Praxinoscope was known by its marketed name, the Whirly Gig of Life

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Through the image of this proscenium, was another opening where it would appear if the curtains had been drawn back. Within this opening you would see the Praxinoscope images as if moving. Subject matter would be circus acts, dancers, jugglers, horse races et cetera.

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Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Pantomimes Lumineuses were projected by the Théâtre Optique, an animated moving picture system first presented on 28 October 1892. It will be presented in the appropriate chapter (seventeen).

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it appears that anything illuminated and moving, was part of the fever of the coming of animated pictures

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The Fountain of Colladon was a luminous fountain consisting of projecting light inside a stream of water. In the engraving a man regulates the flow of water that feeds a fountain placed in the centre of a container intended to collect the water.

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Worthington told us a “school-boy at Rugby” some twenty years earlier had wondered about falling drops, so Worthington went on to define how falling drops of milk, mercury, and water appear to be “lying unbroken” or have essentially been in a “violent exercise.”

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“the first really comprehensive objective images that have been obtained with anything approaching so brief an exposure”

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Worthington notices differences between his first drawings of droplets and his photos, which he attributes to the imagination’s pursuit of perfection.

He states “the mind of the observer is filled with an ideal Auto-Splash whose perfection may never be actually realised.”

Worthington appreciates “the inventors of the sensitive plates,” which have provided him “the first really comprehensive objective images that have been obtained with anything approaching so brief an exposure.”

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He began his career apprenticing at the Litchfield Enquirer newspaper, where he developed an interest in photography. By age 18, he was head of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University, where he started experimenting with photographic reproduction techniques.

He later moved to Philadelphia and in 1885 co-founded the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. From the 18th century onwards, the art of light projection continued to develop. The first to manufacture and market tri-chromatic devices is Ives.

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Ives is best known for developing the practical halftone process in 1878, refined by 1886, which revolutionized printing by allowing photographs to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines. This process breaks images into tiny dots of varying sizes to simulate shades of gray, enabling high-quality printed illustrations. This remains foundational to modern printing.

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Ives was a pioneer in colour photography, demonstrating a natural colour system at the 1885 Novelties Exposition of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

He developed the Kromskop system (pronounced chrome-scope), commercially available in England by late 1897 and in the U.S. by 1898. The Kromskop used red, green, and blue filters to create and combine three colour-separated images into a full-colour photograph, viewed through a special device or projected.

Though praised for its quality, the system was not commercially successful due to its complexity and was discontinued after the incredible Autochrome process emerged in 1907. Notably, Kromograms by Ives, discovered in 2009, are the earliest known natural colour photographs of San Francisco, capturing the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake.

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Ives received numerous accolades from the Franklin Institute, including the John Scott Medal (1887, 1890, 1904, 1906), the Elliott Cresson Medal (1893), and the Edward Longstreth Medal (1903). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1922, and the Frederic Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America is named in his honor.

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Ives held over 70 patents, including the Photochromoscope camera, Chromogram for colour projection, a short-tube binocular microscope, and early experiments in stereoscopic motion pictures. He also collaborated with Jacob Leventhal on anaglyph 3D shorts called Plastigrams in the 1920s.

NINTENDO THANKS IVES
In 1903, Ives patented the Parallax Stereogram, the first ‘no-glasses’ autostereoscopic 3D display technology. This used a parallax barrier—a grid of alternating opaque and transparent lines—to create 3D effects from stereoscopic image pairs.

The concept, inspired by his halftone work, was first conceived around 1885 and exhibited in 1901. This technology has influenced modern 3D displays, such as those in the Nintendo 3DS.

1877-1878 
EADWEARD JAMES MUYBRIDGE (1830 – 1904) 
Governor of California Leland Stanford and Muybridge had discussed the idea of a horse’s legs being off the ground or not, when trotting. Some say a bet was made, some say it’s a myth.

To prove conclusively the truth, Muybridge rigged his cameras to photograph a series of pictures which showed that in fact, the four hooves did leave the ground at one point, at the same time.

This made the horse appear as if bounding through the air, with legs tucked neatly underneath. No one had ever seen anything like this before. Until now, most if not all paintings that depicted horses running, made them look like a dog in a gallop.

The cameras had been set along the track on the outer rim, with triggered shutters set at appropriate intervals. The horse was forty feet from the camera and the exposure was approximately 1/1000 of a second. The exposure was triggered electro-magnetically using wires across the track.

This event has gone down in history as one of the most important moments in the story of moving picture development. The series was published later in 1881 under the title Attitudes of Animals in Motion.

A patent was granted for this method of photography in 1897.

A proof of twelve photos of Stanford’s superb trotter, Occident taken at the Palo Alta track and is from the 1881 published series.

At the time these photos were taken, Occident was traveling 22 1/2 mph. This lantern slide and others like it reside at the Kingston-on-Thames Library and Museum. Occident was not the horse that won the bet, if there was one.

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Speaking of flying horses, Muybridge rigged his cameras to photograph in stationary sequence instead of panning like Marey was doing over in France.

Cameras were set along a track with triggered shutters using an electro-magnetic mechanism that included wires strung across the track which the horse triggered as they ran past.

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WHY THE SILHOUETTE?
So many have asked, why is this particular animal of all the animals Muybridge photographed, in so much contrast? The answer is simple; a bright sunny day: exposure not perfect: the lined and numbered backdrop was pure white: and the result is a horse and rider looking like they are in a shadow.

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The Horse in Motion proof sheet. The horse Sallie Gardner, running at a 1:40 pace over the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878.

Frames 1-11 were used to make the animation (Zoopraxiscope disk in 1878). The filly became a mare in 1879.

Below, you can see the technical specs from the bottom of The Horse in Motion published proof sheet, of how the photographs were taken (24 cameras in a line on the track and setting trip wires to trigger the shutter of each camera) on 19 June 1878.

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Armitage writes about technical aspects surrounding the photographing of the “celebrated flyer” in a lecture he gave five years after the event.

Lectures on Painting: Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, By Edward Armitage, G. P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1883, pp175, 176

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And here (r) from the Peter Pollack book The Picture History of Photography, From the Earliest Beginnings to The Present Day, H. N. Abrams, New York, 1969, one of the cameras Muybridge used on p227.

Left- one of the cameras, at the George Eastman House.

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MUYBRIDGE ZOOPRAXISCOPE WORKING REPLICA
Working replica of Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope made by British Aerospace and described by Stephen Herbert. This complete replica was originally in the Museum of the Moving Image, London and is now in the Kingston Museum Collection. Six minutes.

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Figure 6 on page 5 is identified as Operating track, and shows Muybridge’s horse and rider being photographed, with description.

^{Image Internet Archive}

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WATCH a superb video on the work Muybridge did and how the pictures were transferred to disk and then projected on the Zoopraxiscope.

SEE a silent but beautiful slide show of the Muybridge operating track, the building and cameras in this short video.

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ANOTHER CLAIM-TO-FAME
October 1875 Texas: over the course of four days Sallie Gardner ran 6 races or 52 furlongs, or 6-1/2 miles. She won all six. Not just made immortal by Muybridge, she was a talented “flyer” in more ways than one.

^{Source Foolish Pleasure}

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The initial idea of the Telectroscope was to see faraway images in real time. Television indeed. But whether to record and then project, or broadcast live, was a hard thing to pin down at first. A name closely associated to the Telectroscope is a Polish genius named Jan Szczepanik (1872-1926), and I don’t use that word lightly.

Whether of cinema or television history, this man deserves a rightful spot in my study of pre cinema for the simple fact that many of his patents for the Motion Picture industry which are in the hundreds, are still used today.

However, if Szczepanik ever built a Telectroscope, it was for television, because he called it “a scheme for the transmission of colored rays.” What ever it may have been, it caught the attention of Mark Twain who wrote of it more than once, calling it a Telectrophonoscope. Possibly a typo.

Twain (Samuel Clemens) referred to Szczepanik as “the Austrian Edison” (the ‘London Times’ of 1904 published in 1898).

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From The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, New York, August 1898 issue entitled ‘The Austrian Edison keeping school again,’ this is one of the Mark Twain pieces on the Telectroscope which he misspelled as Telectrophonoscope.

Also pictured is the Constantin Senlecq hand-written patent transmitter Telectroscope from 1877.

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From what I can conclude, the Telectroscope as a generic term, was adopted by many men working in the pre television era. They included; Bell, Tainter, Constantin Senlecq, George R. Carey, Adriano de Paiva, Szczepanik, Ludwig Kleiberg and some others.

However, from all accounts it appears that The Telectroscope must be accredited to Senlecq, of Ardres France, which is a device to transmit from a distance through a telegraphic wire, pictures taken on the plate of a camera, being invented in 1877. Television as we know it today, and not a Motion Picture camera.

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The Scientific American magazine of 19 October 1878 printed eighteen drawings from Muybridge’s photographs on the first page of this issue.

Readers were invited to cut and paste the pictures into strips and to view them in their home Zoetrope, a precursor of motion pictures.

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Images 7-8-9 below, from Scientific American magazine of 19 October 1878 suggesting the reader cut the strips from one to twelve and apply them to their own Zoetrope.

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Here is the write-up on page 241 of Scientific American that accompanies the front-page images of the trotter Abe Edgington.

Read it here at Internet Archive.

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He was granted patent the next year on 4 March. The patent also covered Muybridge’s painted white backdrop with its numbered vertical lines “to show the position and progress of the horse and his posture at each exposure.”

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As he stated in his application for US Patent № 212865;

1878
MUYBRIDGE SECRET WEAPON
JOHN DOVE ISAACS I (1857–1933)
John D. Isaacs I is a very obscure but important name in the development of early motion projection. He is rarely spoken of but played a pivotal role, albeit short-lived. While always overshadowed by Eadweard Muybridge himself, Isaacs was a key figure on the technical side, being a mechanical engineer and instrument maker active in California during the 1870s–80s.

He was Chief Engineer for the Southern Pacific Railroad. John D. Isaacs was the engineering ‘secret weapon’  that made Muybridge’s career run smoothly after 1878. In that year, after Muybridge’s initial attempts with silk trip-wires failed because they were either too slow or the horses would snap them, as President of the Southern Pacific Railroad, Leland Stanford assigned his man Isaacs to solve the technical hurdles.

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ISAACS’ ESSENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Isaacs transformed a clumsy series of cameras that weren’t working properly, into a high-precision scientific instrument.

His two main inventions were:

🎞️ The Electromagnetic Shutter: At the time, shutters were often just lens caps or simple boards. Isaacs designed a dual-sliding wooden shutter held by a catch. When an electric pulse was sent to a small magnet (solenoid), it released the catch, allowing the shutter to fire at a speed of roughly 1/1000th of a second.

🎞️ The Sequential Trigger System: He developed the electrical circuitry that allowed the cameras to be triggered precisely as the horse moved past, ensuring the instantaneous photography required to prove the “unsupported transit” theory (that all four hooves leave the ground at some point in the gallop).

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HOW THE MECHANISM WORKED

🎞️ The Dual Slides: The shutter consisted of two wooden panels with a horizontal slit in each. These were held in a cocked position by a small latch connected to an electromagnet.

🎞️ The Magnetic Release: When the horse triggered the circuit on the track, the electromagnet pulled the latch, releasing the tensioned slides (held by heavy rubber bands).

🎞️ The Exposure: As the slits in the two panels crossed each other directly in front of the lens, they created a momentary opening of approximately 1/2000th of a second. This was fast enough to freeze a galloping horse’s hooves without blur—a feat previously thought impossible.

🎞️ The Battery Arrangement: Isaacs and Muybridge arranged the 24 cameras in a shed. The wires were stretched across the track at 21-inch intervals. This converted a linear distance into a temporal sequence, effectively creating the first “frames” of a motion picture.

Without this specific mechanical precision provided by Isaacs, Muybridge’s photos would have been too blurry to prove anything, and the Zoopraxiscope would have had no clear images to project. This video is a BBC London reconstruction of how the Issacs / Muybridge Electromagnetic Shutter system would have worked in operating the twenty-four cameras.

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After Muybridge published his work, Isaacs’ brother and some colleagues argued that Isaacs deserved equal or primary credit for the invention of the “apparatus for portraying motion.”

Isaacs himself once wrote that he had suggested the very principle of making motion pictures to Muybridge, though history has largely remembered Muybridge as the primary author, and not Issacs.

In fact, I have found it rather difficult to gather and verify the information I’m sharing (secondary sources outnumber primary). Issacs is rather an enigma when it comes to pre cinema history.

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Here is an illustration of the electric arc as it was depicted in an 1870s publication, and with close up.

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Eugène Adrien Ducretet (1844-1915), manufacturer of the manual electric arc lamp known as the Voltaic Arc Lamp. Ducretet advanced the illumination of the Projection Lantern that much further and closer, to Cinematography.

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^{Image Stephen Herbert}

Donisthorpe and Croft’s second version of the Kinesigraph, a celluloid strip camera and projector is pictured here. Also, three frames from the celluloid strip of Trafalgar Square in 1890.

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FILMING LOCATION – WHERE IT HAPPENED

One of George Dean’s really interactive children’s book series was the Panorama Series where the child physically ‘got into the book.’

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Dean & Son produced an imposing range of attractive and practical items that accommodated the Victorian era’s captivation with all things optical. Especially when movement was involved. Their flagship product may have been the Panorama Series.

This advertisement showing the child ‘in’ the book (bottom left corner) is found in several late 19^th century journals and catalogues. This one being The Publishers’ Circular and General Record of British and Foreign Literature, volume 42, published by Sampson Low, in 1879.

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one of George Dean’s really interactive children’s book series was the Panorama Series where the child actually ‘got into the book’

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The child could get inside the fold out just like a real Panorama or Diorama.

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THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD?
Sourced through AbeBooks and directed there with thanks from Jo at Vintage Pop Up Books, are the first four panels of Dean and Son’s Musical Nursery Rhymes Panorama Series. This child’s floor Panorama was 9.8 feet long when unfolded.

Each panel was printed with varnished chromolithographs throughout. Ten nursery rhymes, each with accompanying music score and coloured images. Here are four of those panels.

_{Images AbeBooks}

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This, was George Dean’s really interactive children’s book series where I said this was the Panorama Series where the child could literally ‘get into the book.’ Pictured here is a panorama photograph of the Panorama Musical Nursery Rhymes.

This from what I have been told, is the only known Dean and Son Panorama Series entry, in the world.

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The Dean and Son Panorama Series offered a panorama book showing imagery that stood up on its own like a small screen in its concertina style, if organized in a zigzag to provide standing support. It was presented to the child as a toy rather than as a text to be read.

Dean and Son were famous for publishing pop up books, tunnel books and many other pre cinema printed products for over two hundred years, well into the 20^th century.

Between the years 1883-1885, Muybridge took more than 100,000 photographs, which would later be published in 1887.

The Zoopraxiscope operated by projecting images drawn from photographs (by Faber and Eakins), rapidly and in succession onto the screen. The photographs were painted onto a glass disk even though Langenheim’s Hyalotype process allowed photographs to be copied onto glass. 

^{Photograph Kingston Museum}

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This “wonderful California horse story” was reported in the Palo Alta newspaper;

“Mr. Muybridge has laid the foundation of a new method of entertaining the people, and we predict that his instantaneous photographic, magic-lantern Zoetrope will make the round of the civilized world.”

^{Photograph Kingston Museum}

Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939) was a German inventor and early filmmaker, widely recognized for his role in the development of motion pictures.

Alongside his brother Emil Skladanowsky, he invented the Bioscop (or Bioskop), an early movie projector, and staged the first public film screening in Europe on 1 November 1895, at the Wintergarten Theatre in Berlin.

This predated the Lumière Brothers’ Cinématographe public debut of 28 December 1895 by about two months. Max was trained in photography, glass painting, and optics, notably at the Hagedorn workshops, which manufactured theatrical lighting and Magic Lanterns.

He and Emil toured Germany and Europe from 1879 to 1890, presenting Magic Lantern shows, mechanical theatres, and water fountain displays. Remember Colladon?

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The Skladanowsky brothers’ primary venture was centered around the Bioscop, and their later activities involved a company called Projektion für Alle (Projection for All), which distributed 3D anaglyph slides, flip books, and amateur film equipment.

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Max Skladanowsky was apprenticed at the Hagedorn workshops in Berlin, where he trained in optics and worked with theatrical lighting and Magic Lanterns. Max experimented with painted glass plates for Magic Lantern shows, creating the illusion of moving images through cross-fading.

However, he was dissatisfied with the quality of these ‘fog pictures.’ Pictured here are notes he used on his fog picture lectures throughout Europe, and a Max Skladanowsky Mechanical Lantern Slide for Fog Pictures, possibly made at the Hagedorn factory of a Dutch Windmill in Winter.

^{Images Bundesarchiv Berlin, № 1435, c. 1879}

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Wilhelm Hagedorn
The beginnings of the Nebelbilderfabrik, or translated as fog picture factory, the dissolving view lanterns of the former plumber Hagedorn begin around 1875 when he began manufacturing Dissolving View biunial lanterns and slides. He then hired Max in 1879. The company was still producing lighting for stages until the 1960s.

^{Image Bernd Scholze Collection}

After the Bioscop’s limited success, Max Skladanowsky founded Projektion für Alle in the late 1890s. This company focused on Flip Books (reusing Bioscop footage), 3D anaglyph slides, and amateur film equipment, and produced some films directed by Max’s younger brother, Eugen Skladanowsky, in the early 20th century.

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The Bioscop had two lenses that alternately exposed an aperture. The 54mm wide strips containing the film footage were cut apart and then all the even and odd images were glued together to form two new tapes.

With this technology, the Skladanowskys outperformed their competitors with large images and flicker-free projection.

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In July 1895 they demonstrated their construction to the directors of the famous Berlin variety show Wintergarten, who booked it for a series of performances. The first public demonstration took place in the winter garden on November 1st, 1895.

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The audience saw a program of acrobatics, dance and sports numbers and finally got to know the inventors of the apparatus, who bowed to the audience in the film. Although the Bioscop was still used until 1897, it had no future partly because the machine was large and cumbersome and not suitable for commercial use.

Max is seen here demonstrating a Flip Book. Year and photographer unknown.

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Max Skladanowsky becomes a true pioneer of pre cinema. He even pre dated the Lumière’s in presenting motion pictures to a paying audience, and then went to Paris and attended the 28 December 1895 showing at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café.

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1879
ÉMILE DUHOUSSET (1823-1900)
This French artist, Colonel, master hippologist and author writes The Gaits, Exterior and Proportions of the Horse (must have been the 2nd edition) while at the same time, placing a band of Muybridge sequence photographs into a Zoetrope.

Duhousset’s curiosity to experiment was a bold leap by physically embedding actual photographs of sequential motion into a pre cinematic device. This meant he offered anyone who saw it, an early if primitive, taste of motion pictures, powered directly by photographic reality.

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Photographs having been obtained by Duhousset of Muybridge’s initial series in 1878 (19 June) may have been of Sallie Gardner, as the images are quite similar─Silhouetted (like the Muybridge contact sheet, right) with high contrast resulting from bright sunlight and the pure white background wall Muybridge used.

Looks like the same horse to me. At nearly the same time, William Bernhardt Tegetmeier [coming up next]—the editor of The Field magazine also mounted Muybridge’s photographs into a Zoetrope for a Zoetrope-based demonstration.

He subsequently marketed Silhouette strips based on those photographs.

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Duhousset placed the photographs into a Zoetrope and comments in The Gaits, Exterior and Proportions of the Horse in 1879 that “I suitably spaced these photographs and submitted them to the test of the zootrope: the experiment was conclusive . . . .”

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On 25 January 1879 the Parisian L’Illustration published an article by Duhousset outlining the gaits of a horse, that covered two full pages and included eleven images of the horse in motion.

Included, and for comparison, illustrations from the book (pp18 and 19).

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Duhousset comments on page 26 how different the gait of the animal appeared when compared to what artists, painters and draughtsmen had been furnishing down through the ages.

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LOOK WHAT PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMATOGRAPHY TAUGHT US
Pictured here from the Duhousset illustrated book The Gaits, Exterior and Proportions of the Horse is a drawing on the left (page 29 and figure 14) showing the incorrect gait of the galloping horse depicted in artwork up until this point in time.

On the right is the drawing made from the Muybridge photographs provided to Duhousset of the way a horse really looks when running (page 20, figure 7). This was a stunning development in the world of art separate from animated pictures, which dealt a heavy blow to painters in particular.

Muybridge had shown how a horse should really look when in a gallop. It was baffling that they had all been wrong for centuries. Photography and in particular its child chronophotography, had shown us that the equine did not run the same way the also-quadruped canine ran.

All quadrupeds do not run the same way.

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Duhousset’s Zoetrope experiment was more than a novelty, it was a stark, brutal slap at centuries of horse-motion mythology. And it’s a milestone most people haven’t even heard of, despite being right under the cinema historian’s nose.

READ the English version of The Gaits, Exterior and Proportions of the Horse published in 1896 at Internet Archive. First published in 1874 as Les allures, l’extérieur et les proportions du cheval.

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These images were part of Muybridge’s famous study, commissioned by Leland Stanford, to settle the debate about whether a horse has all four hooves off the ground while galloping.

Tegetmeier likely received prints or copies of these photographs, possibly through scientific or professional networks, as Muybridge’s work was widely discussed in academic and photographic circles at the time.

1879 TO 1885
MUYBRIDGE UNVEILS HIS ZOOGYROSCOPE
Designed and built to show the photographs he took sequentially of Stanford’s race horses, trotters and standardbreds in motion, Muybridge presents his later-named Zoopraxiscope at several locations in Palo Alto and San Francisco.

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Muybridge entertained the public, artists, and even royalty for 15 years by using the Zoopraxiscope to illustrate his lectures throughout the US and on two European tours.

Pictured: the Stanford mansion prior to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake 18 April which destroyed it.

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A sad part of his later career that is not widely known; he wanted to destroy some of his work, namely some disks triggered by the lack of interest at the Zoopraxographical Hall at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

He stopped lecturing because of this in 1895.

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The disks Muybridge wanted to destroy where the cartoonish ones painted by Erwin F. Faber. Muybridge stated he wanted them “utterly destroyed“ because he didn’t want to be remembered for this kind of work.

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1879
ELECTRIC CAMERA OBSCURA
The December 9th 1878 edition of the magazine Punch spoofed Thomas Edison’s version of sending conversations over long distances. It was the same idea Bell had been working on for years and had patented in February 1876, called the Telephone.

The device identified in Punch was called Edison’s Telephonoscope  and featured a drawing by George du Maurier of father and mother figures sitting in their home before what appears to be  a cinema screen, television or video display.

They are talking into and listening from, cylinders in their hands.

Edison’s Telephonoscope idea was an audio-only device with limited research and had only been thought of for patenting a few months earlier. There was no mention of a visual component in Edison’s patent, on what eventually became the Megaphone.

This publication of a drawing and description of an audio-only device, into a full-blown audio-visual transmitter capable of video-conferencing is typical of the fever, which was sweeping the world in the late 19th century regarding the imminence of motion pictures.

It was the same idea Bell had been working on for years and had patented in February 1876, called the Telephone.

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The caption under the George du Maurier 9 December 1879 edition of the magazine Punch reads;

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Amongst Edison’s Papers were found some technical notes and drawings like these, for his concept of the Telephonoscope. It’s dated 17 May 1878 and resides at Rutgers University | Swann Galleries.

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In Le Vingtième Siècle Robida also depicts the future of fluid motion combined with sound, through electric transmission. His Telephonoscope gives us television, video, movies, video streaming all rolled into one.

Right, “Mr. Ponto Loved the Theatre.”

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The dimension of the screen in the du Maurier drawing has been determined to be identical to an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. The widescreen image depicted in this 1879 India ink drawing is therefore equal to the Ultra Panavision 70mm film format.

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Ultra Panavision 70 lenses pinch frames into a 2.76:1 aspect ratio thanks to the anamorphic lens it uses. Ultra Panavision 70 continues to provide the largest picture size we’ve seen in the history of Cinematography except for one widescreen format in 1927.

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In 1927 Abel Gance used the Polyvision widescreen cinema format with an aspect ratio of 4:1, especially made for the production of Napoleon. The name Polyvision was given to this motion photographic system by French film critic Émile Vuillermoz.

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TOP
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1899	Chapter Nineteen 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty 1911 +	Copyright
HOTDOC Internet Archive Channel	HOTDOC X Channel	HOTDOC You Tube Channel

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