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: 1850 – 1859}

Things are tightening up in terms of activity and time. This chapter will cover only nine years of discovery and invention. From the cave to the Kinetoscope, we have travelled some 6000 years at least, towards the development of recreated motion.

Some of the most significant elements in this timeline now unfold as we begin our travel through the most exciting stages in our study of The History of the Discovery of Cinematography.

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How beautiful images were created with the Debusscope is hard to fully grasp. The University of St. Andrews Collections describes the Debusscope as …..

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Pictured is his 1870 lecture at the Royal Institution in London, on the front page of the London Illustrated News.

Tyndall demonstrated that a beam of light could follow a curved path when trapped inside a stream of water. This showed the principle of total internal reflection, the same physical mechanism that allows light to travel through optical fibres.

His experiment is often cited as one of the earliest demonstrations of guided light transmission.

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Tyndall’s 1850s work is foundational because it proved that light could be guided along a curved path. It inspired later scientists to explore light‑guiding materials, eventually leading to glass fibres.

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However, in the 1850s, some photographers used hand-tinting to add colour to black-and-white photographs, such as Daguerreotypes or paper prints. This involved manually applying coloured pigments, dyes, or oils to the surface of the image to mimic natural colours. While this wasn’t true colour photography (since it didn’t capture colours photographically), it was a common way to introduce colour into images during that era.

There’s no evidence of any photographic process in 1857 that could capture colours directly from light. The technology was still in its infancy, with most efforts focused on improving monochrome processes like Daguerreotypes, Calotypes, and Wet Collodion plates.

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Earlier experiments, dating back to the 1840s, tried to find a “chameleon substance” that would directly take on the colour of the light falling on it. Edmond Becquerel had achieved images of the solar spectrum and even coloured objects (like a stuffed parrot shown in 1855), but he couldn’t “fix” the colours, meaning the images faded quickly when exposed to light for viewing.

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Levi Hill published a book on his Hillotype process in 1856, claiming to produce Daguerreotypes in natural colours. However, the process was incredibly complicated, often unreliable, and his claims were met with much skepticism at the time. Modern analysis has confirmed that his process could reproduce a limited degree of colour, though many of his examples were also hand-coloured. Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (a cousin of Nicéphore Niépce) was also doing experiments in the 1850s with photographing coloured objects, but his results were not stable either.

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1850s
HONOURABLE MENTION
OSCAR GUSTAVE REJLANDER (1813–1875)
Rejlander was a pioneering Swedish-born British photographer and artist, best known as one of the founding figures of art photography in the 19th century. Rejlander trained as a painter and portrait miniaturist before turning to photography in the 1850s and eventually settled in England and became a central figure in Victorian photography. Rejlander is most famous for combination printing, an early form of photo manipulation.

His most celebrated work, The Two Ways of Life (1857) pictured further below, is a moral allegory made from over 30 separate negatives, combined to create a single seamless image. It depicts two paths in life: vice and virtue, using classical composition and dramatic lighting. This technique prefigured modern photo-editing and influenced later photographic art.

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FRAMES FROM A FILM
Rejlander’s work is relevant to pre cinema because his use of tableaux vivants and staged compositions anticipates motion-picture mise-en-scène or, arrangement of visual elements in a film or theater production. His fading and dissolving techniques (especially in series and moral allegories) echo the dissolving views of the Magic Lantern tradition.

His staged allegories and photographic manipulations directly anticipate the visual language that cinema would adopt just a few decades later. Many of his photographs are like frames from a film.

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He worked with and influenced other photographic pioneers like Julia Margaret Cameron. Queen Victoria reportedly bought copies of his works, which helped legitimize photography as a noble art form. Rejlander is now seen as a visionary who used the camera not just to record reality, but to craft artistic visions, which was a radical idea then.

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many of his photographs are like frames from a film

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Rejlander straddled art, science, and technology. His staged allegories and photographic manipulations directly anticipate the visual language that cinema would adopt just a few decades later. His studies can be seen as single frames from an unmade motion sequence. Small scenes of domestic or comic life were popular in optical peep shows. Rejlander’s images echo those mini-narratives, each a frozen scene from a possible moving picture.

Rejlander’s “cinema before cinema” lies in how he staged photography like a hybrid of lantern tableaux, dissolving sequences, and early motion studies, creating a bridge between static art and the moving image. Pictured is what the art world calls Rejlander’s crème de la crème, The Two Ways of Life (1857) a photograph stitched together from 32 negatives into a cinematic spectacle.

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Having an itch for rotating portraits that offered a sequence of movements like that of Nadar and his brother, Hesler took a short series of four photographs of the renowned topographical surveyor James Duncan Graham (pictured), which date anywhere from around 1850 to1859.

The only problem with his attempt is that there are not enough to show any kind of movement of Graham. I therefore have not made any animation, it being pointless. In the sense that the model connected the postures by rotating regularly between each shot, it might nearly be analyzed as a spinning portrait and a series of movements.

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As Caroline Chik tells us in her Érudit article ‘Serial and Sequential Photography: Origins and Ambiguities,’  regarding the Graham photographs;

“The illusory sequence’s reading order is indistinct, though, and more importantly, there is such a large break between the images that the idea of movement is reduced to an abstract series. Unquestionably, each of the four portraits only makes sense when viewed as a component of a cohesive whole. However, it is more difficult to pinpoint exactly what this whole was in the photographer’s mind—whether it was a collection of features, positions, and points of view, or a series of stages of a compound movement. “

Below, twenty-three portrait photographs of Lincoln taken by Alexander Hesler, all different, but not believed to have been posed sequentially for the purpose of imitating rotating movement.

The Galantee showmen or Savoyards put on lantern shows that became known as Galantee So which translates to “a fine show.”

The subjects would probably relate to Biblical, moral, and current events, and the showman would create stories for the children watching.

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The Galantee showmen gave way to the Professors, showmen who had access to more elaborate equipment and wonderful, but expensive, animated slides.

Robertson was a professor of the Magic Lantern show and perfected the Phantasmagoria.

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Left, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (founded 1838). The screens at the Polytechnic were about 25 feet (8 metres) and included musicians, and special effects sound technicians.

The projectionists often used 4, 5 or even 6 uni, bi, and/or triunial lanterns.

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known as Galantee showmen or Savoyards, they competed with the Raree showmen who used Peep Boxes as opposed to lanterns

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The Royal Polytechnic Institution presented fabulous shows like spectacular Dissolving Views. It closed in 1876 and its slides were auctioned off in 1882 for £900. As Magic Lanterns were purchased by the public, and people could now create their own lantern shows for themselves at home.

1850
THE HYALOTYPE
WILLIAM LANGENHEIM (1807-1874)
A new process of making a positive image on a glass disk is announced by Langeheim, a transplanted American from Germany. The method is called the Hyalotype and it processed glass plate albumen prints onto slides. A Hyalotype is a photographic picture copied from a negative onto glass, creating a positive transparent image. This process, patented by the Langenheim brothers in Philadelphia in the 1850s, was often used to create lantern slides for projection or larger glass transparencies for decorative purposes, such as window displays.

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Albumen-on-glass photography, first realised in 1847 and introduced in 1850, is still the finest resolution photographic method ever devised. The Hyalotype of the Langenheims is considered the father of the 19th century Magic Lantern slide.

This is the photograph of the Smithsonian which was used to create the Hyalotype just shown.

The inscription on the Hyalotype label reads; “ORIGINAL VIEW Talbotype from life… Hyalotype on glass for Magic Lantern Slides …..”

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Lantern slides were now easier to make and allowed more light to travel through them during projection, producing a sharper image, than when paint was used on glass. The majority of the Langenheims’ slides were black and white with a tiny tint to improve the clarity of the projected image.

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This is a positive stereo view of Niagara Falls by the Langenheim brothers shown at the first World’s Fair held in London in 1851. They stood on what was then called Table Rock on the brink of the Horseshoe Falls (Canadian side of the Niagara River/border with the US).

A dangerous place to be in 1850.

Table rock jutted out from the bank until continuous deterioration during the 19th century caused it to finally collapse sometime after 1850.

In his trip journal, a now-unknown visitor to Table Rock in 1848 detailed his experiences, noting that;

“as I stood in the awful place the Table Rock and looked into that deep yawning gulf below a beautiful rainbow was seen, as was the case at various other points…This is indeed a solemn, awful place, the most interesting place I had visited…I felt that it was the work of an Omnipotent friend.” 

^{– Archives & Special Collections, Brock University Library}

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Hyalo is Greek for glass.

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Alongside his brother Frederick, William’s work makes it possible for glass plates or disks to receive photographs with ease as well as Magic Lantern slides. While the Hyalotype process is now obsolete, it played a crucial role in the evolution of photographic technology and visual media.

1850
STEREOSCOPE – FANTASCOPE
LOUIS JULES DUBOSCQ (1817-1886)
In 1850 David Brewster approved of Jules Duboscq’s designed Stereoscopes. And it’s those very Stereoscopes that allowed Stereography to soar in popularity throughout the world starting in Europe. Sometimes seen as Stereoscopomania.

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Proving that exposure sells, orders for his Stereoscope came in following the Crystal Palace showcasing. One of the first orders delivered by Duboscq came in January 1852– a crate of twenty-five Stereoscopes to Antoine Claudet to be sold by him in London.

^{Images Antiq-Photo}

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spinning brought motion and movement in relief, with assistance from lenses or mirrors

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1852
STEREOSCOPE – FANTASCOPE
JULES DUBOSCQ
Duboscq’s attempt at 3D anamorphosis. In addition to his stereoscope patent, Duboscq registered a stereoscopic Fantascope in May. He advertised the instrument several times but was never quite delighted with the outcome.

It is unknown how many copies were made, but the only material that has been discovered so far is a cardboard disc with twelve albumen stereo pairs illustrating machine operating.

The original disc comes from Joseph Plateau’s collection, which is now housed at Ghent University Museum.

^{Images Ghent University Museum, Animation Denis Pellerin}

Our friends at Magical Media Museum have made a proclamation. That “this is the oldest extant photographic motion picture.”

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Another version of Duboscq’s attempt at 3D anamorphosis as seen through his Stereoscope-Fantascope or Bioscope.

This one not tinted and easier to see, and created / uploaded by Old Films and Stuff.

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Duboscq continued to be one of the foremost suppliers of Stereoscopes during the 1850s.

His Stereoscopes would initially be sold along with Stereoviews from Claude-Marie Ferrier, although later their enterprise soured.

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“Come in, come in’ he cried. ‘It’s free. I don’t want any money; I do it all for the honour.’ At these words the animals flocked in and took a seat.”

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“The Monkey Displaying the Magic Lantern” silver thimble, has a waffle pattern top and sides. Portrayed are the monkey with a Magic Lantern and an audience represented by a turkey, a cat and a dog.

An excerpt from the poem . . . .

“A man who gave magic lantern shows possessed a monkey that always attracted a lot of spectators with his amazing tricks.

Jaco, that was his name, walked a tight rope, marched and drilled in a Prussian way and had a tumble.”

The poem continues . . . “Come in, come in’ he cried. ‘It’s free. I don’t want any money; I do it all for the honour.’ At these words the animals flocked in and took a seat.

Jaco gave a long speech to prepare his audience for the things to come. He took the lantern and the shutters were closed. The monkey kept talking about all the wonderful things he was going to show his public: the sun with its beautiful beams, the moon, the origin of the world, Adam and Eve……….”

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Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian was only thirty-three years old when he rose to recognition by being elected to the Académie Française and his blood relation to Voltaire.

The Revolution erupted soon after and he hid himself near Paris in Seaux because he belonged to the nobility.

He was imprisoned in the Conciergerie on 15 July, 1794 and was released after a few weeks, but he became very ill and died on 13 September that year, at the age of 39.

The poem concludes . . . . “The audience got uneasy. ‘Heck!’ said the cat, ‘Of all the miracles he’s blaring about, I can’t see anything at all.’ ‘Nor can I’, said a dog. The room was black, the wall was black, everything was black.

The monkey shifted a painted glass to and fro in the magic lantern and did not hear his public grumble. He talked and talked and talked as a modern Cicero….

He only forgot one thing: To light the lamp in his lantern.”

THE MOISSE FANTASCOPE
FIRST THOUGHT TO BE C. 1850, THIS DISCOVERY HAS SINCE BEEN DATED TO C. 1820
In 1991, French pre cinema historian and authority in dead media Thomas Weynants, along with three other colleagues, made an amazing discovery in the Limousin region of France about 340km south of Paris. Weynants found an optical treasure known as a Fantascope.

He found this Fantasmagorie mobile lantern from the early 19th century in almost pristine condition. Its origin and exact date of manufacture and original purchase at the time of discovery were difficult to determine.

^{All images courtesy Thomas Weynants}

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“great historic figures of the time were transformed into phantasmagoria subjects via these hand-painted slides, for example two portraits of Bonaparte….”

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This precious magic lantern instrument of the Fantasmagoria was found in the castle Château de Moisse near the village of Bétête and was originally named by Mr. Weynants as the Moisse Fantascope.

^{All images courtesy Thomas Weynants}

Also found were three different lenses; a Fantasmagoria lens, a Megascope lens, and a Dissolving View lens-set (a double lens with individual cat-eye accessories). Each of the individual lenses is mounted on wooden board attachments for easy exchange.

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Here is an old postcard of the Moisse Castle from the 19th century. Photo Alphonse de Nussac.

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READ Thomas Weynants personal story on the finding of these pre cinema artifacts at The Moisse-Weynants Fantascope in The new magic lantern journal: volume 7 number 2 (September 1994), pp.10-11.

Reproduced by courtesy of the Magic Lantern Society, UK, accessed 2 December 2023.

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Along with the lenses where found twenty-three beautifully hand painted lantern slides. Four of those slides pictured here.

As Weynants points out;

“great historic figures of the time were transformed into phantasmagoria subjects via these hand-painted slides, for example two portraits of Bonaparte. Such historically important figures illustrate another theme in the phantasmagoria.

Other examples are portraits of Marat, Robespierre, Louis XVI, Danton, etc., which were projected onto “smoke curtains” with the help of a hidden lantern . . . . a further 4 hand-painted slides were inspired by Greek Mythology, religion and gods (other important inspirational sources for the phantasmagoria). For example, Hero & Leandre, Hébé, l’Education d’Achille, l’Enlevement de Dejanire.”

^{– Historian and collector Thomas Weynants}

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Seen here is a Google map showing the village of Bétête in the Limousin region of France, 340km south of Paris, and the Château de Moisse. Two photographs by Chris Brookes.

Included is an old undated postcard of the castle. Image Alphonse de Nussac.

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“by increasing the distance between screen and fantascope during complete darkness, the result is the illusion of an approaching devil…..”

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The skull was carved bone with a painted wood rib cage, a burlap fabric cowl, articulated jaw, and metal arm operated by concealed wires on an ebonized T-frame. The sarcophagus was a height of 4 ½ x width of 7 ¼ inches.

^{All images courtesy Thomas Weynants}

The skeleton’s manufacture has since been attributed to Pierre François Antoine Molteni (1786-1866) whose grandson was François Marie Alfred Molteni of whom I have made mention of here before and will again.

It’s manufacture was originally dated to somewhere between 1810-1825.

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On the subject of who built this Fantascope, the original short list included Lerebours, Dubosq, Molteni or Chevalier. There were no apparent identifying features on the instrument to aid in this mystery.

It does however have a mechanical auto-focus mechanism connected from the lens down to the wheels. This feature allowed the lanternist to dolly forward or backward while keeping images in sharp continuous focus.

Weynants expands on this auto-focus technique by stating;

 
“In order to achieve this the phantasmagoria lens is used, and connected to the wheel operated mechanism which regulates the distance between the movable front lens and the fixed condenser.

This results in a focused image on the screen regardless of the size of the projected devil or distance between the fantascope and the screen.

By increasing the distance between screen and fantascope during complete darkness, the result is the illusion of an approaching devil.”

“The different parts of the mechanical auto-focus system and how it is synchronized with the front optical element of the Phantasmagoria lens, eventually leading to the wheels. Because the system regulates the focus, the result in total darkness is a projected zoom-effect.

For this application (the projection of opaque objects) the Megascope lens is mounted on the Fantascope. With this adaptation the name of the apparatus simply changes into Megascope (better known as an Episcope).

The idea for this peculiar technique and Fantasmagoria application was inspired by Jacques Alexandre César Charles who originally used the Megascope for scientific purposes during lectures.”

^{– Historian and collector Thomas Weynants}

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this precious magic lantern instrument of the Fantasmagoria was found in the castle Château de Moisse near the village of Bétête and was originally named by Mr. Weynants as the Moisse Fantascope

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Below we see the Moisse Fantascope fitted with each of the four lens attachments;

🎞️ dissolving view (cat-eyes)
🎞️ dissolving view lens and disc
🎞️ spherical lens
🎞️ megascope lens

^{All images courtesy Thomas Weynants}

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There are modern day aerial photographs of the Château de Moisse found in the PD.

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UPDATE: The skeleton has been renamed to honour Molteni as the Moisse Molteni Fantascope Skeleton Illusion and accurately dated to c. 1820. Along with the Fantascope it has been extensively exhibited and documented by Stephen Herbert, David Robinson, and Laurent Mannoni.

Mr. Weynants had originally made his discovery available to the Passion Cinema Exhibition at the Paris Film Museum where it was on extended loan.

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The Moisse Molteni Fantascope Skeleton Illusion and Moisse Molteni Fantascope currently reside at Musée des Arts Précieux Paul-Dupuy after being auctioned off and acquired by the city of Toulouse and le Musée.

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SEE a 2:40 video produced by Auction Team Breker who brokered the sale of the Moisse Molteni Fantascope Skeleton Illusion to the city of Toulouse and the Musée des Arts Précieux Paul-Dupuy.

1850
SIR AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD (1817-1894)
An archaeologist, Layard excavates the remains of Babylon in 1850 and describes a rock-crystal find dating back to the first lenses.

Layard shook the world a year earlier (1849) when he unearthed Nineveh.

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Having an exacting eye for detail, Marville concentrated on the crumbling infrastructure of pre modern Paris.

He took more than 425 photographs of the eroding streets and decaying buildings. Six examples pictured here.

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Below is Marville’s The Seine from the Pont du Carousel, looking toward Notre Dame, c. 1854 on a salted paper print from a paper negative mounted on paperboard.

Housed at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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On pp188 and 189 of The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, (Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969) Gersheim refers to Blanqard-Evrard, and the new Albumen process.

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📷 1. the albumen is then beaten to a foam using steam-driven churns
📷 2. it’s then fermented in large casks for several days
📷 3. then it’s floated on the albumen solution and hung on racks to dry
📷 4. the coated paper is calendered in rolling presses to make it more flexible

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c. 1850s
CHILD’S TOY MOVING PANORAMA
In pursuing the origins of Cinematography, I discovered this toy Moving Panorama entitled The Worlds Wonders. It is housed at the Bill Douglas Museum, University of Exeter.

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Its full title was The Worlds Wonders: Excursion Around the World presented by Worlds Wonders Panorama. Below is a scroll for this small Panorama.

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this small home-use Moving Panorama is like having a miniature Cinema of your own

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This video of a toy Moving Panorama is a production of Errki Huhtamo, historian, collector and Professor of Media Archeology at UCLA. It’s brought to us by The Crankie Factory and Sue Truman. It lasts 51 seconds and shows seven of the twenty scenes on the scroll.

1850
COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY
LEVI HILL (1816-1865)
Hill was an American minister who ventured into photography, claiming a pioneering role in colour photography during a time when the field was still dominated by black-and-white images like Daguerreotypes. Hill, living in a remote part of New York State, published a little booklet in which he claimed that;

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His announcement caused the sales of conventional Daguerreotypes to slump as consumers waited the release of this new colour photography. Hill was threatened by other Daguerreotypists as a result of his announcement.

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scholars at the National Museum of American History studied Hill’s work in 2007 and discovered that he did in fact find a way to replicate colour

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The Reverend Levi Hill method was a complex one and involved dangerous, explosive and corrosive chemistry. Hill turned his back on photography altogether in 1855.

It’s likely that exposure to these photographic chemicals caused Hill’s early demise ten years later in 1865.

Here is the title page to Hill’s booklet.

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Testing revealled that some of the colour has been applied and is not inherent in the emulsion.

Surviving Hillotypes here of an unknown female and a sampling of fruit and nuts.

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In 1945 Columbia University Press published German historian Joseph Eder’s History of Photography. On page 316 of his work, Eder once again dispels the effort of a published non-German pioneer in his own field. This time it’s colour photography.

READ it here at Internet Archive.

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Twenty years before instantaneous photographs became generally accepted by the photographic world

“from this experiment the conclusion is inevitable that it is in our power to obtain pictures of all moving objects, no matter in how rapid a motion they may be provided we have the means of sufficiently illuminating them with a sudden electric flash”

^{– William Henry Fox Talbot, 1851}

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Talbot understood the two most important factors required to bring the photographing of fast-moving objects into reality.

Soon, sequential images would not have to be posed.

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As Talbot put it following his experiment in front of the Royal Institution, London in June 1851;

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The Gernsheim entry on the event, from The History of Photography, from The Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969 p445.

1851
PHOTOGRAPHIC STEREOGRAPHY
CLAUDE-MARIE FERRIER (1811-1889)
Ferrier’s time atop the echelon of Photographic Stereography was brief but spectacular; 1852 to 1863with fellow stereo photographer Charles Soulier.

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The first glass Stereoview was created in 1852 by Claude-Marie Ferrier, a French photographer working for Paris optician Louis-Jules Duboscq. As well, the first glass Stereoviews for the Brewster Stereoscope were created by Ferrier.

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Ferrier began a series of landscape and landmark Stereoviews of much of Europe creating the premium Stereoviews in the nineteenth century. Under the name Ferrier Pere and Fils et Soulier, their glass images were made available on card mounts eventually numbering over 40,000 titles.

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In his book The World of Stereographs William Darrah said Ferrier “produced the world’s finest glass stereographs.” This Stereograph below shows an early view of the excavation at the Roman Forum.

Claudet opened a Daguerreotype studio in the Colosseum in Regents Park. It was a single-image stereoscope hence the name Monostéréoscope (literally single stereoscope). While the conventional stereoscope required two slightly different images (one for each eye) to produce a depth illusion, Claudet attempted to simulate this stereoscopic depth using a single image combined with optical refraction and reflection tricks.

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It drew attention for its attempt to simplify stereoscopic viewing but was criticized for being less convincing than true binocular stereoscopy. Claudet published notes on it in The Athenæum (London) and the Philosophical Magazine, 1851–52, where he discussed both this and his Stéréomonoscope, a later refinement.

Gaston Tissandier, in A History and Handbook of Photography, 1876, states Claudet was “an able operator” who “invented a very curious kind of stereoscope which can be seen by several people at the same time.” on page 292. READ it here at Google Books.

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the invention of this instrument tended to change established theories about binocular vision

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Claudet was deeply involved in optical illusions tied to photographic realism: Earlier he’d worked on daguerreotype transparency projections for the Magic Lantern. The Monostéréoscope sits midway between his photographic and optical work, a pre cinema crossover where a static image was given illusory depth through mechanical optics.

Claudet himself was impressed and hopeful of the Stereoscope and of Stereoviews in general. Upon beginning to take portrait Stereoviews, he had this to say on the subject;

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British Patent № 13292 (1851) — “Improvements in instruments for viewing pictures and producing the appearance of relief from single images.” In 1858 Claudet produced his dark screen Stereoscope, which could be seen by several people at once.

The centre was cut and a piece of ground glass received two images from two lanterns giving an impression of being in relief. Without the mirror and prism no effect will be seen.

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1850 – THE GRAND MOVING PANORAMA OF PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
So many pre cinema artifacts pop after being forgotten in museum basements or storage vaults for a hundred years sometimes. This 1996-discovered portion of The Grand Moving Panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress is one example of this, and is the second version that was made.

In 1996, Tom Hardiman discovered a portion of The Grand Moving Panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, (painted c.1850-1851), at the York Institute in Saco, Maine. SEE it here (2560 by 392 pixels) digitised  http://precinemahistory.net/bunyanpanorama.htm

It was thought lost for over a century when found. First conceived and painted in 1848, the giant canvass was initiated by American artists Edward Harrison May and Joseph Kyle, both members of the National Academy of Design in New York. They collaborated with prominent Hudson River School artists, including Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, and Daniel Huntington, who contributed scene designs. A second version was painted by Joseph Kyle and Jacob Dallas in 1850–51, which is the one that survives today.

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Debuting in 1850 at New York’s Washington Hall, the Panorama was a sensation. A second version was created in 1851 to tour simultaneously, reaching cities like New Orleans and Detroit. It reportedly attracted over 100,000 viewers in its first year, reflecting its appeal during a time of religious revivalism when Pilgrim’s Progress was second only to the Bible in popularity among American Protestants. After touring until 1864, the panorama faded from public view. The first version was lost, and the second was stored in a Biddeford, Maine barn before being donated to the York Institute (now Saco Museum) in 1896. It was forgotten for a century. In 1996, Tom Hardiman, Curator of the York Institute in Saco, Maine discovered a portion of ‘The Grand Moving Panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress’, (painted c.1850-1851), at the Institute. The canvas has been restored at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was published in two parts, first in 1678 and then in 1684.

This seventeenth-century allegory tells the story of the main character Christian, on his pilgrimage to his eternal reward, Heaven.

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Panoramas as well as Moving Panoramas were given reviews by the media, as films are today

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These individual scenes from the two large sections discovered of The Grand Moving Panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, include; They Beheld the Fate of the Apostle, Land of Beulah, They Arrive at the Delectable Mountains, and finally, They Arrive at the Delectable Mountains.

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These paintings hold more than forty scenes. Some are from twelve to thirty feet wide. Well-known figures from the Holy Scriptures are shown against beautiful landscape scenes as recorded in Bunyan’s classic story.

These shows can’t help but remind us of the early work of David Wark Griffith, and Cecile B. Demille. Panoramas as well as Moving Panoramas were given reviews by the newspapers, as films are today.

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This Panorama in its original state would have been 8 feet tall by approximately 900 feet long. For scale, the Carnival Magic cruise ship is 1000 feet and the Prudential building in Chicago 995 feet and the Queen Elizabeth II pictured below, is 965 feet.

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Below, construction of the Moving Panorama scaffold that will house the Grand Moving Panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress at the York Institute in Saco, Maine.

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SEE an introduction to the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress lasting 6:44. Produced by the Saco Museum and uploaded by Jessica Skwire Routhier.

The Panorama is unique for its blend of fine art and popular entertainment, created by academically trained artists yet designed for mass audiences. It reflects the era’s religious fervor, artistic innovation, and is the technological precursor to film. Its rediscovery and restoration highlight its enduring value as a cultural and historical artifact.

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Archer preferred to share his findings and discoveries with the photographic world first, and never patented his process like many inventors

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With the negative-less Daguerrean system, prints, enlargements, and reductions were not possible. However, with the Wet Collodion process these were all now possible.

The process is published this year and becomes widely known.

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Archer preferred to share his findings and discoveries with the photographic world first, and never patented his process like many inventors.

He died penniless but his estate was given a crown pension of fifty pounds annually.

1851
JOHN ADAMS WHIPPLE (1822-1891) AND GEORGE PHILLIPS BOND (1825-1865)
As the director of Harvard College Observatory, Bond along with Whipple took successful Lunar Daguerreotypes of superior quality. Using the observatory’s telescope in taking the picture, it was displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and in fact won a medal.

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Image Source: Science Museum Group The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum. This photograph is called The Moon, No. 37, from 1851, Daguerreotype taken as seen through the Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope, at Harvard College Observatory, case size 4-½ x 3-¼ inches.

In 1847, Cambridge installed The Great Refractor, a fifteen-inch telescope. It was the biggest telescope in the country, and on par with the best in the world for twenty years.

It served as the foundation for the Harvard College Observatory’s development.

1851
JULES DUBOSCQ (1817-1886)
Duboscq, a lantern maker and optician, designs and builds a machine he calls a Stereoscope and obtains a patent for it. He also builds a superb lantern capable of viewing microscopic documents known as the Lanterne Photogénique pictured here.

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Duboscq produced several significant optical items (either making or improving on others designs) including the Lanterne Photogénique (three images below) for viewing microscopic documents, and the early animation device known as the ‘Stéréo-Fantastique’ or ‘Bioscope.’

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The electric lamp and lantern of Duboscq, allowing the projection of the carbon poles on the disk. Illustrations are from Boys Playbook of Science, 1866, p345.

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1852
FRANCIS HERBERT WENHAM (1824-1908)
This pioneer of aeronautics and aerial locomotion had an optical side to him it appears. Dabbling in photography since he was a young man, he apparently created posed photographs of a man-at-work, in sequence, for the Phenakistiscope. This leads to a fascinating and often-overlooked anecdote about his early involvement with moving pictures.

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A letter from Wenham, referenced in the Hopwood book Living Pictures, relates an amusing story about a series of posed photographs he created in 1852. He arranged a man-at-work in a sequence of different poses to simulate motion. When these photographs were put on a Phenakistiscope, the subject of the photographs (the man who posed) famously declared that “he never worked like that!” (referring to himself of course).

Ben J. Lubschez, the author of The Story of The Motion Picture, 65 BC to 1920 AD, published in 1920 by Reeland Press has uncovered the optical side of Wenham. Lubschez shares what little he knows about Wenham on p24, below;

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This story highlights a key challenge in early attempts at capturing and recreating motion: the difficulty of accurately representing a fluid, continuous action through a series of static, posed images. While Wenham’s work in this area didn’t lead to a major breakthrough in moving pictures, it serves as a wonderful example of the early intersections between photography and the burgeoning field of animation and cinema. Wenham was an avid photographer calling himself an amateur although he accompanied Francis Frith whom I have a series on, to Egypt utilizing the wet-collodion plate process in photographing the tombs of the Pharaohs.

Historic Camera states;

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As far as the Wenham sequentially posed photographs are concerned, once again I have not been able to locate anything visual for us to enjoy. While there are historical documents that mention his letter describing the creation of these images for a Phenakistiscope, the photographs themselves do not appear to be publicly available or digitized online.

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1852
STEREOSCOPIC PROJECTION
FREDERICK WENHAM
I believe this is likely the same man. On page 86, Ray Zone states that in 1895 Wenham writes in a letter claiming to have created a device containing a series of “ten stereoscopic photographs for viewing on two Phenakistoscopes.”

I cannot be absolutely sure as the first names are different, and no DOB or DOD are given are given for Frederick.

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Claudet was a visionary pre cinema pioneer who considered the idea of “moving photographic figures”

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On the topic of Motion Pictures, Claudet was a visionary pre cinema pioneer who considered the idea of “moving photographic figures.” We find this on page 256 of the Gernsheim’s The History of Photography published in 1969.

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aside from Stereoscopy, Claudet took what is now the oldest known Daguerreotype of any Māori

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This Antoine Claudet quote believed to have been spoken in 1851 is in reference to the Stereoscope. Claudet told us;

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Pictured here are two posed experimental photographs in one, of Antoine Claudet for viewing in a stereo viewer.

They are from 1852 and were patented in 1853. Image provided by Stephen Herbert / The Optilogue.

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Here from John Henry Peppers Boys Playbook of Science, in 1866 and on pp323, 324 and 325 the idea for a Stereomonoscope and a Stereomoscope with illustrations.

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Eric Keast Burke, Australian photographer and journalist, purchased Claudet’s Daguerreotype for the National Library of Australia in 1960, and it was recognized in 2020.

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The Scientific American reproduced a short notice about the creation of the Mascher Viewer from the London Mining Journal in May 1852, and Mascher answered with a letter he wrote in which he said;

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The viewer held two stereo photos as well as two lenses. The Daguerreotypes were seen through the two lenses placed in the lower lid. When raised, the viewer would look through the lenses and see what appeared to be a far more life-like image of the subject.

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The Mascher Viewer is believed to be the first American patent for a Stereoscope. The viewing case is foldable, made of wood, and covered by leather.

Below Mascher’s thoughts on his invention;

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1853 IMPROVEMENTS
Schematic illustration of the improved Mascher Viewer by John Frederick Mascher, patented on 8 March 1853 № 9611 below, for his “improvement of daguerreotype boxes.”

The improved Mascher Viewer included the following description in the patent;

“The nature of this invention consists in the construction of a box with a lid and a movable flap, which are adjustable against each other. The flap, which has space inside the box, carries two ordinary lenses; a daguerreotype is fixed opposite each of these lenses. By this arrangement is created by a complete stereoscope and the daguerreotypes appear in two-eyed observations such as sculpturally true images”

^{– John F. Mascher, Patent No 9611, 8 March 1853}

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STEREOSCOPIC LOCKET MEDALLION
Mascher, a German-born watchmaker and inventor based in Philadelphia, patented a Stereoscopic Medallion in 1855. This was a compact locket or medallion designed to function as a Stereoscope, allowing users to view two slightly different images (typically Daguerreotypes) to create a three-dimensional effect.

The medallion featured two hinged lids, each containing a lens, which, when opened and aligned with the images inside, converted the locket into a Stereoscope. These lenses, with a focal length of about two inches, could also serve as a microscope or magnifying glass for viewing details like banknotes, or even as a burning glass. This is patent № 12257, granted 16 January 1855.

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Mascher’s Stereoscopic Medallion was showcased at the National Fair in Washington, D.C., where it attracted significant attention, particularly from women, due to its compact size (some were as small as ordinary watches) and the vivid, lifelike effect of the images.

_{These images are not Mascher Stereoscopic Medallions. They are AI generated artistic representations based on all source descriptions of John Frederick Mascher’s Stereoscopic Locket Medallion.}

These medallions are now considered significant in the history of Stereoscopy and are valued by collectors of early photographic artifacts. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any. Mascher’s designs were mass-produced, with tens of thousands sold, though their popularity waned in the early 1860s with the rise of Ambrotypes and Tintypes based on the collodion process.

This, from cine historian Martin Quigley in his Magic Shadows, The Story of The Origin of Motion Pictures p98.

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Uchatius was an inventor with strikingly technological development skills which places him in history as a pioneer of Cinematography

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He used this device to illustrate ballistics lectures. Drawings by Uchatius published in a Vienna Academy of Science issue, of his 1845 and 1853 Projecting Phenakistiscopes. The upper image- a disk is revolved by a crank. The lower image- drawings are in fixed mounts each before a projection lens and the light source is revolved.

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Figures III and IV as referenced by MacGowan.

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These are two authenticated presentations given by Uchatius in 1853, according to documentation researched by historian Deac Rossell. Rossell refers to the machine as a Projecting Phenakistiscope.

Obtained from his work The Public Exhibition of Moving Pictures Before 1896.

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the Uchatius Lantern Wheel of Light was a sequential image projector based on the Magic Lantern and Phenakistiscope he called the Kinetoscope

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Uchatius was an inventor with strikingly technological development skills which places him in history as a pioneer of Cinematography.

He called both his devices the Kinetoscope, thirty-eight years before Edison’s prototype Kinetoscope debuted 20 May, 1891.

1853
ANIMATED BINOCULAR POLYSTEREOSCOPE
FRANCISCO (FRANCESC) DALMAU (1810-1886)
Francisco Dalmau was an optician in Barcelona and a significant figure in bringing optical entertainment and scientific instruments to Barcelona in the mid-19th century; things like Magic Lantern shows and stereoscopic photography to say the least.

Later on, he and his family were involved with electricity, importing dynamos, telephony, phonographs. The term Animated Polystereoscope appears in a 2018 paper by University of Barcelona professor Cèlia Cuenca entitled The Animated Polystereoscope of Francisco Dalmau Introducing Stereo Photography in Barcelona Through Optical Shows (1853-1863).

According to that research, the Polystereoscope was referred to more as a stereoscopic ‘show’ rather than a physical instrument, although it was definitely a contraption. It was run by Dalmau on La Rambla in Barcelona, active from the stated dates. It seems to have been one of the first times in Barcelona that stereo photography was presented in an optical show context.

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The exact mechanics of the Animated Polystereoscope aren’t fully documented in available sources: e.g. how exactly animated it was (whether by hand-cranked mechanism, slides, sequential photography, etc.).

The press described Dalmau’s offer as:

Cuenca’s paper suggests novelty in combining stereo photography with optical shows to provide the spectacle. Whether there are surviving artifacts of this machine, or photos of it, I didn’t find references to a surviving apparatus. The clearest contemporary description is quoted and discussed in Cuenca’s article published in the International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media, 2018. Cuenca reproduces the press account (Diario de Barcelona; El Áncora; El Presente, Sept. 1853) and summarizes the wording.

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A mechanical/simple mechanism controlled the lighting: the press says a “simple mechanism” animated the pictures. In similar devices of the era that wording usually implies a hand crank, cam, sliding panel or shutter that altered the illumination (for example a small moving lamp, rotating opaque/transparent disks, or a sliding coloured tissue).

Pictured is an unfortunately unreadable and untranslatable clipping of Dalmau’s first Polystereoscope show in Barcelona from the Diario de Barcelona newspaper in 1853 found in Cèlia Cuenca’s 2018 paper entitled The Animated Polystereoscope of Francisco Dalmau Introducing Stereo Photography in Barcelona Through Optical Shows (1853-1863) published in the International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media, Volume 2 on page 56.

Contemporary continental devices achieved “dissolving” and day/night effects in stereoscopic or peep shows by moving internal lamps or varying the transmitted light. So, my thinking is that Dalmau very likely used a small internal lamp/light source and a mechanical shutter or sliding diaphragm to simulate changes. Cuenca notes that collective viewing devices earlier used an internal light point to simulate day to night transitions.

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Pictured is the announcement of the optics of Francesc Dalmau that is part of the book by Cèlia Cuenca and found in the article ‘Francesc Dalmau: that’s how it all started,’ by Jaime Cevallos, 2021 published by modaengafas.

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In concluding, there is no evidence Dalmau produced sequential/true motion Stereophotography (i.e., two-frame-by-frame moving images). The contemporary reports emphasize lighting/atmosphere; other inventors who later patented “animated stereoscopes” (Benoist, Siès, Furne & Tournier, André David etc.) attempted various mechanical shutters and rotating disk tricks, but Dalmau’s 1853 item reads like the earlier Diorama/Dissolving View repertoire, not frame-by-frame cinematics.

Cuenca explicitly treats Dalmau’s “animated” as Dioramic. The press hints Dalmau built the new Polystereoscope in his shop, but it’s not proven whether he constructed the mechanism himself, adapted imported parts, or bought a ready-made apparatus. Cuenca notes Dalmau travelled and may have purchased material abroad (e.g., London) in late 1853. Museu del Cinema in Girona has Stereoscope devices and local collections referenced by Cuenca. Biblioteca de Catalunya / ARCA holds advertising images cited by Cuenca.

Watercolour. Art Gallery of New South Wales.

1853
THE MAGIC MIRROR
EDWARD HENRY CORBOULD (815-1905)
Painted by Corbould from Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lay Of The Last Minstrel in 1805. The Earl of Surrey envisions an apparition of “the fair maiden Geraldine” in a magic mirror.

This painting has strong thematic and conceptual ties to pre cinema, even if it’s not directly a pre cinematic device. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the ‘magic mirror’ is used by a wizard Michael Scott (standing in the shadow) to conjure visions from some realm — a spectral illusion that the viewer passively observes.

This clearly prefigures the function of the Magic Lantern, Phantasmagoria, and later optical illusions. Just like pre cinema.

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While Corbould’s painting itself isn’t a pre cinematic device, it’s conceptually and visually aligned with pre cinema. It embodies the proto screen (a window into another time / space) and it’s steeped in the aesthetics of spectral illusion, connecting literature, painting, and projected vision in the same way the dawn of cinema did.

Corbould based his ‘projection fantasy’ on Scott’s poem and was shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. His pre cinema theme was inspired by an apocryphal incident in the life of the heroic Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a courtier, soldier, and poet at Henry VIII’s court.

1853 JOSEF BERMANN
This Stroboscopic animation from Josef Bermann is in the Cooper Hewitt Collection, Smithsonian Design Museum. Uploaded by the Magical Motion Museum. Background details in the description need not be repeated here.Twenty years after Mathias Trentsensky published Simon Stampfer’s original stroboscopic disks.

A prominent printer, publisher, photographer, and art dealer in Vienna, Austria, Bermann inherited and expanded his father’s art and antique business, becoming its sole owner in 1847. He specialized in sheet music, games, art, and numismatics. He also served as secretary of the Corporation of Viennese Book, Art and Music Dealers from 1861 to 1886.

1853
ADOLPHE ALEXANDRE MARTIN (1824-1896)
Martin modifies the Ambrotype into the Tintype process. The Tintype (also known as a Ferrotype), is created on a sheet of metallic metal, not glass. The metallic plate would then be sensitized by coating it with collodion.

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The seaside backdrop these children are in front of is Cliff House and Seal Rocks in San Francisco.

In the southwest tower which is the left-most turret, is a Camera Obscura lens/mirror seen in the close up.

^{Images collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus}

At age 22, Quinet presents the first binocular-style stereo camera and calls it a Quinetoscope. Quinet is best remembered for his compositions of livestock and landscapes using the Quinetoscope. In 1853, Quinet patented the Quinetoscope, one of the earliest stereoscopic cameras, developed around the same time as John Benjamin Dancer’s similar invention in Manchester, though preceded by David Brewster’s 1849 dual-lens camera.

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Achille Quinet was a successful photographer in Paris from 1869 to 1879. Although he made photographs of the architecture of Paris as well as a series of views of Italy, he is best known for his landscape, animals, and figure studies. The Quinetoscope used two lenses to capture stereograms, enabling three-dimensional images, even of moving subjects. Quinet also worked on lenses with variable shutter speeds, improving control over focus and depth of field.

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Around 1868, he moved to Cély, near Barbizon, where he specialized in “Études d’après nature” (studies from nature). These albumen prints, often mounted on blue or white card stock with his stamp, depicted landscapes, animals, and figures in the Fontainebleau Forest, likely intended as references for Barbizon School painters. His works were compiled into albums sold to collectors.

Referring to Quinet, this excerpt is taken from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era (Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969), and is found on p260.

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Quinet was a member of the Société Française de Photographie (1876–1894) and exhibited at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris. His photographs are held in collections like the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musée d’Orsay, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Through the eyes of the Achille Quinet Quinetoscope, Bois de Boulogne. Housed at the Pavillon de l’Empereur (Garnier Palace or Opéra Garnier) in Paris.

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His work is also occasionally mistaken for that of contemporary photographer Constant-Alexandre Famin, as Quinet may have distributed some of Famin’s images under his own stamp. Parallel themes being the reason.

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The Gernsheims refer to the twin-lens camera of Dancer, from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, p260.

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THE UNION OF MICROSCOPY AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Here is a lantern slide of a Microphotograph by Richard Leach Maddox on the top, and underneath it, a microscope slide of a Microphotograph by John Benjamin Dancer.

Both date from approximately 1860.

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Below is another Stereoview Daguerreotype of Dancer from 1851. This Microphotograph can also be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Thanks to Curator Ella Ravilious.

1853
ANIMATED STEREOSCOPE
PHILIPPE BENOIST (1813-1896)
Benoist offers two stereoscopic views exhibiting different phases of a motion, at right angles, with a “grooved glass” transparent mirror (?) making an equal angle between them. By slight reciprocating action of this glass, the two pictures are alternately viewed, thus giving the effect the Phenakisticope provides.

Benoist’s “animated-stereoscope” was patented in Britain on 23 August 1856, № 1965. There was also a French patent № 16055 dated 5 April 1853. Bibliographic lists of the 1850s photography/optics trade notices, record Philippe Benoist, operating at 7 Rue de Lancry, Paris and mention “animated stereoscopic views.”

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YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS
Biographical entries for Philippe Benoist of Geneva show him working in Paris as a pupil of Daguerre as a lithographer and painter. He was definitely active in the right milieu (photography/stereoscopy/illustration) to be tinkering with stereoscopic inventions. This connection with Daguerre places Benoist in the environment of early photographic innovation, which is highly relevant to the field of stereoscopy.

One academic source (Medium Victorian VR: The Untold Story of the Inventors Who Dreamed of 3D Movies by Izumi Okano) mentions him in a list of inventors who created devices that combined stereoscopy with principles of motion or animation. This paper discussing the history of 3D motion devices states: “Records show that many inventors devised similar devices, including Philippe Benoist of France (1853), Adam Jundziłł of Britain (1856), Henri Dumont of Belgium (1859), and Victor Pierre Sies (1859) and William Thomas Shaw (1860) of Britain.”

This places Benoist in the heart of the Victorian VR movement, experimenting with early forms of 3D motion visualization shortly after the stereoscope’s explosion in popularity following the Great Exhibition of 1851.

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Benoist’s involvement in motion stereoscopy in 1853 is right in the period when many inventors (like Louis Jules Duboscq with his Bioscope in 1852, and Francisco Dalmau with his Animated Binocular Polystereoscope in 1853) were attempting to add movement to the 3D viewing experience. Benoist’s patent № 16055 dated 5 April 1853 stated it was for an “Instrument d’optique dit images animées” (optical instrument called animated images), described in historical accounts as an Animated Stereoscope.

As a pupil of Louis Daguerre, and a working artist specializing in detailed, topographical views, Benoist had the perfect combination of artistic skill and technical knowledge from the early days of photography to experiment with such inventions. In summary, while he is primarily known as a lithographer, Philippe Benoist is cited in historical records as being an inventor who contributed to the early development of animated stereoscopy in 1853.

1853
THE FRENCH FERROTYPE IS THE AMERICAN TINTYPE
ADOLPHE-ALEXANDRE MARTIN (1824-1896)
VICTOR MOREAU GRISWOLD (1819-1872)
J. W. GRISWOLD
Ferrotypes are a photograph process similar in many ways to a Daguerreotype in that they are exposed onto a thin sheet of sensitised metal-in this case iron as opposed to copper. They are also a reversed positive image like the Dag. Light travels in a straight line horizontally, as well as vertically.

On the left is a Tintype group of unknown children. Martin is the name associated with the Ferrotype, having been announced by him in France in 1853. The word Ferrotype is taken from the word ferrous, or the prefix ferro which refers iron. But the Ferrotype quickly changed into the name Tintype, mostly for it’s tinny feel, and it’s light weighted-ness because once introduced into America, as a slightly thinner plate, the name stuck.

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Also referred to as the Melainotype early on, this term comes from the Greek melaino meaning black, and from melaina, the feminine of melas. Two other names associated with this process are J. W. Griswold and Victor Moreau Griswold which from everything I have read, are the same man. And it’s this Griswold who announced the Tintype photographic procedure in the US in 1855. The Tintype therefore is considered to be of American origin.

Pictured is famous dentist/gunslinger Doc Holliday and wife Kate Horoney.

Griswold is credited with this distinction in an article from Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. Photographic historian John Craig suggests J. W. may have been confused perhaps with V. M. Griswold. Sometimes history can be cruel when looking for the truth.

Source John S. Craig.

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It is also alleged that the initial reference made to the Tintype/Ferrotype was later in the Photographic Notes, dated 1 January 1856, announcing the invention by a Professor Hamilton Smith of Ohio. The article quotes Smith as saying it was a process “producing a beautiful picture on a piece of common sheet iron.” The journal referred to the pictures as Ferrographs.

Peter Neff Jr. (1827-1903) was not the creator of the japanned iron Melainotype plate, but he was the individual most influential in manufacturing and marketing it in the US. Tintypes were known to be made on a regular basis up until the 1940s. Tintypes were known to be made on a regular basis up until the 1940s. Pictured, a variety of Tintypes.

One of only two known photographs of Billy the Kid. Both Tintypes.

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1855
VICTOR MOREAU GRISWOLD (1819-1872)
Griswold may have been operating in Tiffin, Ohio, as late as 1855, after being classified as a Daguerreian there for the first time in 1851. From 1855 to 1873, V. M. Griswold was also registered as a Daguerreian in Lancaster, Ohio. According to one source, Griswold also lived in Lancaster for a time in 1852. He received two patents in July and October of 1856; one covered a Collodion improvement, and the other featured a “container” for images that resembled the Japanese tintypes. The corresponding patent numbers were № 15336 on July 15 (“Improved collodion for photographic pictures”) and № 15924 on October 21 (“Bituminous ground for photographic pictures “).

In Lancaster, Griswold started producing Tintype plates in 1856, or possibly as early as 1857 and by 1857, he had effectively created japanned surfaces in a range of hues, such as red, blue, green, chocolate, and white. Later on, he invented two surface coating types that became industry standards: glossy and eggshell. Pictured, a variety of Tintypes.

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WATCH how a Ferrotype /Tintype / Melainotype is created. Take yourself back to 1860. A George Eastman House production. 4:29 in length.

CENTURIES OF SOUND (1853 TO 1860)
A presentation of the history of recorded sound concentrating on Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and his invented devices like the Phonautogram. The list of what you will see and hear is in the description. Runs 4:40

CENTURIES OF SOUND (1878)
A presentation of the history of recorded sound mixed with recorded motion. The history of sound in motion pictures. The list of what you will see is in the description. Runs 4:11

CENTURIES OF SOUND (1887 1888)
The history of recorded sound mixed with recorded motion with a multitude of images. The history of sound in motion pictures. The list of what you will see is in the description. Runs 13:03

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knowing how early photographers struggled with equipment and chemicals helps us appreciate 21st century photography

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Three different styles of portable tent darkrooms, all from Traité Général de Photographie, D. V. Monckhoven, 1865, Paris, 5th edition. The left and right illustrations show both camera and darkroom all-in-one.

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A Two Wheeled Dark Room Wagon, from Pioneers of Photography, 1870, Springfield, VA. Inside and outside views. All illustrations are from the Martí Llorens Collection.

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All three images of this boxed portable darkroom are found in The Photographic News, edited by William Crookes, 1859, London. Volume I. Pages 305 and 306 here.

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Two completely different models of portable photographic darkrooms, both found in The Photographic News, edited by William Crookes, in 1859, London. Volume I.

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Aubert, a French manufacturer of scientific instruments known for his work with Magic Lanterns in the mid 19th century. Based on available information, Louis Aubert, operating out of Paris, was a skilled metalworker and producer of Magic Lanterns and slides. Aubert was highly regarded for crafting moulded tinplate Magic Lanterns, often decorated with translucent, spirit-based lacquer, giving them a vibrant, polychrome appearance. These lanterns were designed for both entertainment and educational purposes, projecting images from glass slides using an oil lamp at the time.

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Only the square shaped Magic Lantern was available in 1854.

The Aubert model was rounded tinplate, finely cut, with red varnish, a cylindrical and conical copper chimney base, a gadrooned pyramidal black chimney cap.

^{Images Patrice Geurin}

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Aubert Polychrome Magic Lantern.

Complete with its original lamp with glass chimney.

^{Images Antiq photo}

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Some of the Aubert “improvements that I have just appended to my main patent” are listed here;

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Patent Nº 21204 filed on October 28 included;

“The removal of the square base which usually exists on the outside of the envelope and from which the objective tube starts and the arrangement inside the body of a transverse channel for placement and movement images.”

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Because of the great diversity of Magic Lanterns, categorising them is difficult. There will always be borderline situations and exceptions, and many of them will fall into sundry categories.

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In addition, various models were released in a variety of sizes; hence, the smaller ones may be categorised as toy lanterns and the larger ones as parlour lanterns.

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Toy lanterns for children have modest dimensions, a simple construction, and were inexpensive. Originally, they were given a candle or a little oil lamp as a source of light.

By 1884, the Lapierre company acquired Aubert’s business, reflecting his influence in the field. His polychrome lanterns, often adorned with decorative relief patterns, remain notable for their craftsmanship and are considered rare collectibles today, as seen in examples like a 18 inches tall lantern with its original lamp and glass chimney.

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In the middle of the 19th century, the only methods of illumination for Magic Lanterns were candles or oil lamps, both of which had been gradually improved since the end of the 18th century.

Pictured is the Aubert System patent dated 28 October, 1854.

^{Images Patrice Guerin}

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it delivered more efficient illumination than a standard flat wick and precisely fits projection requirements

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The Moderator Lamp invented by Charles-Louis-Félix Franchot (1809-1881) about 1836 out-performed almost all other forms of mechanical lamp for use in projection illumination.

X-section illustration of a Moderator Lamp from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, volume 16, page 651.

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The Aubert System consisted of a reservoir and cylindrical wick support. A reflecting mirror (Figure 6) is mounted on a support consisting of a metal rod split over its entire height (Figure 4) adapting perfectly to the slides placed inside the Magic Lantern.

^{Images Patrice Guerin}

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1854
FREDERICK (1809-1879) & WILLIAM LANGENHEIM (1807-1874)
The first total eclipse of the sun, which was visible to North Americans since the discovery of photography, occurred on 26 May 1854.

Frederick (left) and William were there to take eight Daguerreotypes in sequence.

^{Images Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection}

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1854
JAMES AMBROSE CUTTING (1814-1867)
Cutting creates the Ambrotype process. The name is taken from (and a play on) his middle name. Ambrotypes were glass negatives viewed as positives when placed over a dark background.

Below the Ambrotype showing negative and positive.

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“Ambrotypes were really negatives on glass: when backed with black, the silver was seen as a light tone, so the picture was seen as a positive”

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SEE what a James Ambrose Cutting’s Ambrotype is all about. Seeing is believing. Video produced and published by the Chiesa-Gosio Collection. Runs 1:13

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J. A. Cutting developed a Lithography process whereby photographic negatives can be used for paper reproduction positives.

Examples below of some Ambrotypes of the time:

📷 President Abraham Lincoln
📷 Union soldier-father and his tiny daughter
📷 a Confederate soldier

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Ambrotypes were used between 1851 and 1865. They were glass negatives appearing as positives against a dark backdrop.

They succeeded the Daguerreotype.

A clean glass plate was coated with collodion and immersed in silver nitrate. While still wet they were exposed.

1854
ARTHUR JAMES MELHUISH (1829-1895)
Melhuish receives a patent for a paper roll holder. The prepared and sensitized paper was held against a glass plate by a spring pressure plate. Melhuish showed it to Prince Albert in 1856.

Illustration of the roll holder below.

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Gernsheim refers to Melhuish in his The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, on p183;

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Melhuish became Honorary Secretary to the Amateur Photographic Association, formed in 1861 and in 1873 he was named Photographer Royal to the Shah of Persia (below) following his visit to London during that year.

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No image, illustration or photograph of the boat or structure seems to exist. And you’re wondering where the term chemical comes into it.

Buhoup’s shows were at night. With the use of limelight this is likely why the word chemical was injected into the title.

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The rotunda, which had a diametre of sixty-four feet and a circumference of almost 200 feet had a completely black painted interior.

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a large Diorama sitting on a Mississippi paddle boat floating down the river for an evenings entertainment

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Maffey and Lonati, two French showmen who hailed from families with a long history in the entertainment business, emigrated to the United States and exhibited what they claimed to be Daguerre Dioramas.

The story continues;

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Designed to travel on a showboat, the Hindoo Pagoda Diorama was said to seat 2,400 people.

It travelled the Ohio River until destroyed by fire in Trinity, Louisiana April 1857. Less than three full years on the Ohio River, and it all came to an end way to soon;

1854
ANDRE ADOLPHE EUGENE DISDERI (1819-1890)
Disdéri was a French photographer who pioneered the Carte-de-Viste, a small photographic portrait mounted on a card, which became immensely popular in the mid 19th century. Born in Paris, Disdéri initially worked in various trades before turning to photography in the 1850s. In 1854, he patented the Carte-de-Viste process, which used a multi-lens camera to produce multiple images on a single plate, making portrait photography affordable and accessible to the masses.

Disderi’s Carte-de-Viste system uses between 4 to 36 lenses taking photos on one plate. It was a type of calling card approximately 2.5 by 4.5 inches holding a number of images on the plate.

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Disderi’s studio became known as the Palace of Photography producing thousands of CDV’s every day

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A Multiplying camera, like the four-lens Bon Ton, seen here was made c. 1854 by Disderi. He devised a way to make Carte-de-Viste multiple images on a single photographic plate. Carte de Visite photographs are small prints on cards and were used like business cards are today.

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Disderi’s studio became known as the Palace of Photography and had almost one hundred workers producing thousands of CDV’s every day by the late 1850s. His innovation revolutionized portraiture, turning it into a widespread social phenomenon. People collected and exchanged these small, standardized portraits, which were often used as calling cards.

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Despite his success, Disdéri faced financial difficulties later in life and died in relative obscurity in 1890.

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1855-1890
STÉRÉO CLASSEUR
JULES RICHARD (1848-1930)
Richard introduces the Taxiphote seen here. The early models were first called Stéréo Classeur, but were renamed Taxiphote soon thereafter.

^{Image André Ruiter}

It was the most advanced Stereoscope available at the time.

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Taxiphote was the name of a series of multiple view Stereoscopes based on slide trays. A counter on the left side shows which slide in the tray is loaded.

^{Image André Ruiter}

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The interior of the Taxiphote showing lens and mirror system in starting position on the right and mirror system tilted down on the left.

^{Images André Ruiter}

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The Jules Richard Taxiphote mechanism is clearly visible in a front view left, and mechanism rear view on the right. A wonderful inside view of a working high-quality Stereoscopic Viewer.

^{Images André Ruiter}

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^{Images André Ruiter}

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SEE a terrific video of the Jules Richard Taxiphote being loaded and then operated. Unfortunately we do not get to see the views. Runs 2:26

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Poitevin discovered the light–sensitive properties of bichromated gelatin and invented the Photolithography and Collotype processes

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The Collotype process can be learned by reading Practical Printing and Binding, A Complete Guide to the Latest Developments in all Branches of the Printers Craft, edited by Harry Whetton, Odhams Press, London, 1946, pp289-292, at Internet Archive.

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the projection Phenakistoscope was not marketable but did advance the thinking and hands-on operation of animated pictures for the future

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This projection Phenakistoscope of Duboseq contained two disks, one glass and one wood. The wood disk housed a series of lenses. The images painted on the glass disk were in sequence (approximately 14).

The disks were parallel, and turned at speeds different to each other.

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The two disks in conjunction with each other operated like a shutter and condenser at the same time.

The projection Phenakistoscope was not marketable but did advance the thinking and hands-on operation of animated pictures for the future. Illustration and schematic below.

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c.1855
PEEP EGG VIEWERS
Peep Eggs or Peep Egg Viewers are a type of optical toy that was popular during the Victorian era, particularly in the mid-19th century. Falling under the categories of optical instruments and Peep Shows, Peep Egg Viewers unlike moving image viewers, such as the Phenakistoscope or the Zoetrope, this personal viewer allows one person to view one still image through a monocular lens.

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because a Peep Egg is made of alabaster, light passes through the body of the device and no other source of illumination is required

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SEE a beautiful and to-the-point one-minute visual elucidation of the Peep Egg Viewer. You can also view this video at You Tube by Nassy.

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Because a Peep Egg is made of alabaster, light passes through the body of the device and no other source of illumination is required. The body is fitted with twin alabaster handles rotating a spindle so that two or three prints can be mounted inside the body of the egg.

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Each person turns the handle at their own speed to see each of the images, which are concave. There is a simple lens at the top of the viewer and the image is laid at the bottom facing up.

In essence, a peep egg viewer was a personal, handheld peep show or diorama, a charming and intricate novelty that captivated the Victorians with its blend of craftsmanship, optical illusion, and a touch of the exotic.

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they would appear like they were moving in and out of the cardboard when animated

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Czermak supposed that this principle provided endless possibilities to make different 3D animations.

Below the Stereophoroskop showing the central prism of mirrors (P), slots (S) and drum for holding photos or drawings on the inner side (G).

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His pictures remained unseen by the masses however, because newspapers do not yet have the capability to publish photographs in 1855. Fenton was granted permission to photograph the Royal Family.

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Referring to Fenton and Marcus Sparling, from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, p183.

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Left- A Quiet Day in the Mortar Battery, photograph by Roger Fenton, 1855, housed in the George Eastman House Collection, Rochester, New York.

Right- Cannon Balls being unloaded at Ordanace Wharf, Balaklava Crimea, taken by Roger Fenton, 1855.

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THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
Speaking of cannon balls . . . .

Casting a shadow on Fenton’s work by determining if he staged or manipulated his photographs of the Crimean War. Fake news in 1855?

SEE an interesting video here on this study. A Vox production. Eight and 1/2 minutes.

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this colour image of a tartan rosette is the earliest surviving permanent colour photograph in existence

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In front of each lens was a small reservoir of glass containing either:

1. a red solution (ferric sulphocyanate)
2. a green solution (cupric chloride)
3. a blue solution (ammoniacal copper salt)

The three triangles partially overlapping as Maxwell stated;

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Maxwell and English photographer Thomas Sutton (1819-1875) took three photographs of a tartan ribbon (below) in 1861 using the three filters and then projected the first trichrome colour photograph in front of an astonished audience. Sutton was the one who clicked the shutter.

^{Digitised copy of the original photograph}

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This colour image of a tartan rosette is the earliest surviving permanent colour photograph in existence. It was taken one hundred and sixty-two years ago (as of 2023) by Thomas Sutton, way back in 1861.

It has been enhanced and cleaned up, but not colourised by Stuart Humphryes at BabelColour.

^{Imaged cleaned by BabelColour}

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John Llewelyn was especially talented at capturing fleeting moments on film such as waves, clouds and steam. The Paris Exhibition in 1855 gave him a silver medal for his motion series of images depicting movement.

Pictured here is a Collodion glass slide from the motion series.

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is this the first ever photograph of a snowman taken in Wales?

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Llewelyn invented the Oxymel process in 1856 using acetic acid, water and honey to preserve images within the Collodion process. Now, glass negatives could be prepared in advance prior to exposure, as desired.

Below, John Llewelyn and his Calotype camera seen on the right, and his apparatus on the left, 1853.

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As a result of Llewelyn’s Oxymel process, landscape photographers did not need to carry large portable photographic labs and darkrooms with them.

The Illustrated London News in 1856 wrote that;

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Is this the first ever photograph of a snowman taken in Wales? This photograph of the snowman seen on the right was likely taken in 1853 by Thereza Llewelyn.

On the left is a Collodion glass slide showing the South front of the Llewelyn home in Penllergare.

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Images and Info: The John Dillwyn Llewelyn Collection at Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum of Wales comprising approximately eight hundred and fifty photographic prints (mainly salted paper), two hundred and thirty Calotype paper negatives and one hundred and sixty Collodion glass negatives.

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It generated a new compound that burst into a cloud of black smoke when heated. Cellulose Nitrate had been ‘discovered’ by the Swiss-German chemist Schönbein.

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On 27 February, 1846, Schönbein wrote Michael Faraday stating;

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A section of the original Schönbein letter to Faraday;

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Schönbein’s next letter to Faraday, dated 18 March 1846 included a sample, stating;

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We can rewind 33 years and consider French chemists Henri Braconnot who in 1833 experimented along with Théophile-Jules Pelouzé in combining potato starch and nitric acid into something they called “xyloidine” and “pyroxyline” which continued to pave the way towards celluloid.

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Fast forwarding to 1896, there were but three manufacturers of celluloid, in four locations on the globe;

🎞️ Victor Planchon in France
🎞️ Eastman in the US
🎞️ Blair in the US🎞️ European Blair in England

A few smaller players joined these manufacturing ranks by 1900.

1856
THOMAS SKAIFE (1806-1876)
Skaife designed a pistol-shaped camera and is arrested when aiming it at Queen Victoria for a picture. The only thing is, it didn’t really look like a pistol as you can see below. He called it his Pistolgraph.

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Gernsheim refers to the Skaife Pistolgraph, taken from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, p260.

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A Pistolgram Stereoview taken 28 June, 1858 with ink stamp by Skaife’s patented camera. From Thomas Skaife’s Pistolgraph and the Rise of Modern Photography in the 19th Century (Schaaf, L. in The Photographic Collector, Volume 4, No 1, Spring 1983, pp27-39).

^{Image Christies}

Pistolgram inscriptions:

No. 1 Mortar Phantom 1/3 inch track of shell seen above smoke during the firing of 13 inch mortar on Woolwich Common at 11-30 A.M. 28th June

No. 2 Mortar Phantom seen in outline of smoke during the firing of the 13 inch mortar on 28th June.

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Skaife designed a pistol-shaped camera and is arrested when aiming it at Queen Victoria

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1856
KALEIDOSCOPIC PHANTASMAGORIA
SIR DAVID BREWSTER (1781–1868)
Sir David Brewster, known for the Kaleidoscope (1815) and other major optical contributions, gave a series of lectures and writings in the 1850s about what he called “optical marvels.” One rare set of references from his 1856 talks at the Royal Institution and in his book The Stereoscope includes a passage describing;

“The projection of kaleidoscopic forms in a phantasmagoric sequence, dissolving into one another with such rapidity and chromatic grace, as to dazzle the eye and confound the sense” (Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (1856), Appendix notes).

It was a Magic Lantern fitted with a rotating disk holding Kaleidoscopic images (mirrored interiors or Chromolithographic patterns). A dissolving view mechanism gradually faded one image into the next. An optional polarizing filter was said to enhance the spectral colour effects. So why has it been overlooked in the journals of pre cinema history? Possibly because it was a hybrid form— neither narrative nor photographic, so most film histories I believe, have ignored it. But it qualifies as a proto-abstract animation, like an early visual music performance.

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By 1856, Brewster was forty years beyond his Kaleidoscope days and was deeply exploring other stereoscopic optics. But in his later work, especially in his lectures at the Royal Institution and writings like The Stereoscope, he pushed toward theatrical uses of optical illusion — blending science and spectacle. In one passage, he writes of;

That’s not just poetic — it’s a blueprint for motion without mechanics.

The apparatus and it’s functional elements included a Magic Lantern base powered by limelight or Argand illumination. A rotating Kaleidoscopic slide which was a glass disk fitted with symmetrical coloured fragments or mirrored wedges. As it rotated (either manually or clockwork-driven), it formed continuously changing radial patterns. These patterns were reflected within the disk using angled internal mirrors, a scaled-up projection version of the handheld Kaleidoscope. The Dissolving View mechanism was a double-lantern system, where one image fades in as another fades out, using adjustable shutters or moving lenses. Brewster applied this to the Kaleidoscopic patterns — essentially projecting one embryonic geometric form into another, giving a sense of smooth transformation.

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Some accounts I’ve seen suggest Brewster even added music and fog effects, hinting at influence from the Phantasmagoria shows of Robertson and others — but with geometry instead of ghosts. I’m thinking it resembled a live visual music performance, decades before that genre existed. Newspapers of the time weighed in on these performances that offered some visual clarity;

📰 The Literary Gazette, 1856 — notes a “marvelous geometric display” at Brewster’s Royal Institution lecture

📰 The Stereoscope (1856), last chapter — vague allusions to “chromatic projections of kaleidoscopic forms”

📰 Philosophical Magazine, 1855 — Brewster’s experiments with “polarized light projections”

📰 Archives of the Royal Institution — mentions demonstration equipment built “after Brewster’s design” (possibly still in it’s collection)

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Think of Brewster’s Kaleidoscopic Phantasmagoria as a Victorian light show — part Optical Art, part Video Jockey, part scientific demonstration — and wholly ahead of its time. His Kaleidoscopic Phantasmagoria was a live abstract light performance of motion, transformation, and rhythm — all projected for an audience. In modern terms, he was doing a Victorian-era VJ set, but with mirrors and limelight instead of pixels and projectors. Brewster was merging mathematical visual illusion with real-time, dynamic projection, long before it became a trend in modern art or digital media.

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Captain Fowke’s camera of 1856 was manufactured by Thomas Ottewill and Company in London. This Fowke bellows camera you see here is housed at the Science Museum Group Collection.

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Francis Fowke folding bellows camera is housed at the Science Museum Group Collection because his son presented it to them in 1908.

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1856
THE KINIMOSCOPE
ANTON DOMINIK JUNDZILL
Two revolving discs like the Phenakisticope or Stroboscope are combined by stereoscopic eyepieces, being viewed in a mirror and periodically occluded by a revolving slotted disk. The British patent is № 1245 and the date is 24 May 1856.

The device is called the Kinimoscope (from Greek kinēma, ‘movement’) and is a stereoscopic adaptation of the Phenakistiscope principle, i.e. binocular motion simulation through synchronized rotating disks. “An Instrument for Animating Stereoscopic Figures” and “Improvements in optical instruments for exhibiting motion or other visual effects” the patent states. Mannoni calls him Adam Dunin Jundzill. Mannoni and Crangle go on to say Jundzill “could show ‘cartoons in motion,’ he claimed in his patent” (The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 2000, University of Exeter Press, p241).

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The two discs each bore sequential images—just like a Phenakistiscope. They were mounted side by side and rotated simultaneously, one for each eye. The stereoscopic eyepieces fused the pair of images into a single three-dimensional moving image. Viewing was through a mirror, while a third, slotted disc acted as a shutter, periodically interrupting the view and creating the illusion of motion.

No surviving specimen or illustration is known to exist (the British Library’s GB Patent Abridgments for 1856, class 14 ‘Philosophical Instruments’ contains a short-digitized abstract). The term Kinimoscope predates other kinetic terms like Kinetoscope or Cinématographe by decades. It’s one of the earliest appearances of the prefix ‘kine’ used for motion apparatus in optical entertainment, along with Baron Franz Von Uchatius who used the name Kinetoscope for his 1853 machine.

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UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY 1893
LOUIS MARIE-AUGUSTE BOUTAN
The first underwater photograph taken that we can identify is of and by, Louis Boutan pictured here, who develops a crude housing for a smallish type camera and captures the first diving photograph using an underwater strobe.

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Referring to the first underwater photograph by Louis Boutan, from Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, pp512, 513.

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On the right is an illustration of Boutan taking a photograph, figure 25, page 200 from Boutan’s book, in 1893. And on the left is the actual photograph he took, reprinted on p184.

The sign reads Photographie Sous Marine, or Underwater Photography.

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This is the third underwater camera proposed and built at the Arago laboratory in 1893, figure 15, p176. Also the matching legend in French.

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SEE a tribute to Louis Boutan and an historical reenactment of the first underwater photograph, which took place in the aquarium in Barcelona. From Josep Mª Castellvi 2014/2015. Runs 7 minutes.

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The earliest Phonautograms by Martinville were finally heard in 2008, after 151 years. This was the work of First Sounds, a company that restores and preserves early sound recordings.

Below is a Martinville record, Au Clair de la Lune which could not be played back in 1860.

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Martinville had not created any apparatus to playback his recordings. However, thanks to First Sounds sound engineer Patrick Feaster we now can. Listen to 18 seconds of Au Clair de la Lune – (By the Light of the Moon), recorded 9 April, 1860.

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Martinville recorded Gamme de la Voix or, the vocal scale (do-la-mee-fa-so-la-tee-do). Listen to sixteen seconds of someone reciting the vocal scale, recorded 17 May 1860.

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Below, Martinville’s study in interpreting the Phonautograph’s inscriptions.

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Below are three photographs of two replicas of Martinville’s improved 1859 Phonautograph showing the needle against the cylinder, and Martinsville’s illustration of his improved Phonautograph of 1859.

The two pictures on the left and centre are a replica built in 2014 by Jean-Paul Agnard.
The picture on the right is a replica attributed to Sergio Moises Panei Pitrau.

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Below, listen to 18 seconds of Ducis’s Othello, recorded 17 April, 1860 by Martinville.

He repeatedly used this particular passage from Ducis’s Othello as a test recitation. This is without any doubt, the earliest record of spoken language.

There were many who wanted to marry the spoken word and music, to animated pictures. Some were actually successful, long before 1927. I will cover all that in later chapters.

1857
GREAT ZOETROPES
Beginning in the 1850s we start to see very large cylindrical stroboscopic-type open air devices that showed moving images listed as being eighteen feet in diametre. These became known for a brief period of time as the Great Zoetropes.

All Things Fall, is the title for this 3D-printed working Zoetrope by British artist Mat Collishaw, featuring 350 individuals, elements, and architectural formations. Not exactly what the 1850s offered but there are no existing images to offer. These modern variations are the closest thing to the Giant Zoetropes of the past.

It was initially displayed at Collishaw’s solo exhibition Black Mirror at Rome’s Galleria Borghese earlier in 2015; it was created over the course of six months.

The scene it depicts is based on two paintings by Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens based on the Biblical story of King Herod’s preemptive order to slaughter all male children in Bethlehem.

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One Great Zoetrope and Wheel of Life was documented as 50 feet in circumference and had “life-size figures.” It was installed in the Concert Hall of the Crystal Palace in London.

Apparently, animations had taken place using “strips.” The Zoetrope uses strips of images as well.

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SEE this absolutely amazing still-life Zoetrope with stationary figurines, come to life using the stroboscopic effect in this video called the Tasmanian Tiger from the Melbourne Australian Centre for The Moving Image.

1857
THE SOLAR ENLARGING CAMERA
DAVID ACHESON WOODWARD (1823–1909)
David Acheson Woodward was an American businessman and inventor, primarily known for his contributions to the development of solar energy technology. Born in 1823, Woodward was a pioneer in the field of solar power during the late 19th century, a time when such concepts were in their infancy. Woodward’s Solar Enlarging Camera was first introduced in 1857. It could enlarge quarter plate and half plate portrait negatives to life-size with an exposure of about forty-five minutes using the intense light of the sun.

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“…one of the most significant improvements introduced into the art of photography”

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They were bulky, heavy machines as the image here shows, that used condensers to focus sunlight and a copying lens to project a small negative onto a big sheet of sensitized photographic paper or canvas.

^{Image National Gallery of Canada}

Pictured here are seven of Woodward’s solar enlargers at the Enoch Long (1823-1898) establishment in St. Louis.

Patents in the 1860s and 1870s added a heliostat — a clockwork motor to rotate the mirror to track the sun, and concentrate light on the condenser lens.

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Taken from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, (Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969), on p312 we read what Gernsheim says about Woodward’s Solar Enlarging Camera.

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There were two sizes of the solar camera: a half plate with a nine-inch condenser and a quarter plate with a five-inch condenser. Woodward, a portrait painter, was drawn to the idea of making larger duplicates of images on canvas to paint over.

^{These four images cited to The National Gallery of Canada via Luminous-Lint}

With this camera, he could create life-sized portraits (18 inch x 22 inches) from a half plate negative in about forty-five minutes. In 1859, Woodward traveled to Europe to publicize his innovation.

He showed Antoine Claudet the solar camera while in London. According to Claudet, it was “…one of the most significant improvements introduced into the art of photography.”

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Right: A 1/4 plate camera from Roberts sitting on top of the Woodward enlarger for scale. The box is about four feet long from front of lens to back of mirror, with a height and width of a little over 14 inches.

Left: Woodward’s patented Solar Enlarging Camera by itself.

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This article http://brightbytes.com/woodward.html on David Acheson Woodward written by Jack Wilgus, first appeared in Forays, a cross-disciplinary review published by the Maryland Institute, College of Art, in the Spring of 1996.

^{Image Bright Bytes}

STEREOSCOPY DIRECTLY EXPLOITS HUMAN BINOCULAR VISION
Stereoscopy is a vital tributary of pre cinema, though not always integrated directly into the main narrative of screen history. Its significance lies in how it sharpened 19th century ideas of visual realism, binocular perception, and immersive spectatorship, all of which fed into cinematic logic even before film existed. Binocular optics and the illusion of depth were essential to how pre cinema thinkers and showmen tried to ‘enhance presence.’ Devices like Wheatstone’s Stereoscope (1838) and Brewster’s lenticular Stereoscope (1849) were some of the first technologies to directly exploit human binocular vision.

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Stereoscopy fused science, entertainment, and illusion, much like Magic Lantern shows or Phantasmagoria and was widely commercialized in the mid-19th century. Think of the popularity of the Holmes-style stereoscopes which shaped how viewers expected images to perform.

Shared themes with pre cinema optics:

👀  The illusion of space and motion
👀  Viewer positioning and the management of perception
👀  The role of lenses, mirrors, and light in crafting illusions

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Stereoscopy is a parallel but deeply relevant track, vital for understanding the desire to replicate vision and create visual presence, both of which are foundational to cinema. But if we draw a clean mechanical genealogy from Shadow Play to film, it plays a more conceptual than causal role.

1857
STEREOSCOPIC MOTION SYSTEM
ADOLPHE RÉVILLE
Réville was a French inventor and experimenter in early photography, particularly noted for his contributions to stereoscopic imaging during the 1850s. While limited biographical details are available, his work is highlighted in Caroline Chik’s 2014 Érudit article Animated Stereoscopic Photography before Chronophotography as a pioneering effort in creating motion effects within stereoscopic views, predating more famous Chronophotographic pioneers.

A modified stereoscope viewer incorporating a rotating drum or sliding tray to hold 12–24 stereo pairs (on glass slides or paper cards) allowed users to manually advance the images via a hand crank or lever, thereby allowing rapid sequential viewing without removing eyes from the lenses.

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Adolphe Réville emphasized synchronized binocular alignment to preserve depth perception during motion

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In the mid-19th century, Stereoscopy exploded in popularity following David Brewster’s lenticular stereoscope (1849) and the mass production of stereo cards. Inventors like Antoine Claudet (who patented a multi-view Stereoscope in 1855) sought to extend this static 3D medium into animation by sequencing stereo pairs.

_{Images of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 from Un Jour de Plus à Paris 6}

Réville’s innovation fits this wave, occurring amid the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, where Stereoscopic displays captivated audiences. His system, described in French photographic journals around 1857, addressed the challenge of simulating movement in depth without true motion pictures, which wouldn’t emerge until the 1880s. Réville’s stéréoscopic motion system (système de mouvement stéréoscopique,) was an experimental apparatus designed to cycle through a series of paired stereoscopic images, creating the illusion of 3D animation.

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This cycling through of a series of paired stereoscopic images produced fluid transitions, mimicking actions like walking figures or waving flags in apparent 3D space. Unlike static viewers, Adolphe Réville emphasized synchronized binocular alignment to preserve depth perception during motion. He used wet collodion negatives for high clarity, capturing incremental poses (e.g., via posed models or early multiple-exposure attempts).

The system aimed to reduce jumpiness, common in early Flip Book-like devices by adjusting interocular distance dynamically. Presented at Parisian salons beginning in 1857, it featured sequences such as “a dancer in motion” or “a horse in trot,” viewed through adjustable prisms for enhanced immersion. Chik notes it as an “autonomous” form of animated photography, distinct from linear cinema, influencing later French devices. However, it remained artisanal, not mass-produced, limiting its reach compared to American counterparts like Alexander Beckers’ 1857 Revolving Stereoscope (coming up next).

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1857
TABLETOP REVOLVING STEREOVIEWER
ALEXANDER BECKERS (1815-1905)
Beckers patented a Rotating Stereograph Viewer in 1857 and sold his Daguerreotype company soon after to focus on Stereograph Viewer production.

Below is Alexander Beckers Tabletop Stereoviewer.

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Alexander Beckers worked for Frederick David Langenheim in 1843. Moving to New York, they opened a studio in 1849 naming it Langenheim and Beckers.

Below is a Beckers copper name plate, some Stereoviews and two tabletop stands, one portable and one stationary.

The viewer looked through a set of lenses fixed at the front of the device as the drum spun, creating continuous 3D image transitions, almost like an early form of 3D slideshow. In rare cases, a kinetic illusion or primitive 3D animation (in concept, if not effect). The drum or wheel could be mounted horizontally or vertically, typically housing 6 to 12 stereo pairs spaced evenly around its perimeter. Binocular lenses were stationary, positioned so that when the drum turned, each new pair of images aligned perfectly for 3D viewing.

Often hand-cranked or spring-driven; sometimes rotated automatically at regular intervals. Some devices combined this with a Zoetrope-like shutter to minimize motion blur. Some examples I have posted are Alexander Beckers’ Revolving Stereoscope (USA, patented 1857) and Jules Duboscq in the 1860s.

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Another is Negretti & Zambra, a prominent London optical firm selling a Revolving Stereoscope with up to 50 views on a rotating belt or drum. Image of their Sydenham storefront location from the opening pages of their catalogue.

These devices mark a crossroad between Stereoscopy and animation. They also Illustrate the appetite for mechanized image sequencing and point toward multi-image visual storytelling, a stepping stone to cinematic devices like the Praxinoscope or stereoscopic film reels. They didn’t achieve motion per se, but hinted at it with more of a proto cinematic illusion of change, or progression in 3D.

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As each pair appeared in view, you’d get sequential 3D images similar to an early slideshow or even a primitive illusion of motion in depth. Most marketed sets supported glass or paper stereoviews sized around 3.35 × 6.69 inches, with variations in capacity depending on the size of the drum. They were veneered or polished for showroom appeal like most others were. Brass plates carried the Negretti & Zambra name, signifying quality craftsmanship.

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A knob on the side of the case turned the drum which was a clever presentation mechanism and decorative collector item rolled into one. With as many as 20 views on a drum, browsing through images felt like a curated mini-immersive experience. Although not animation in the modern sense, it’s documented that viewers occasionally claimed that the sequence created an illusion of movement or continuity.

These devices rarely survive today. Auction listings show them selling for modest sums (£300GBP / $398US) when found, though condition varies and they’re prized by collectors for novelty and quality. These are a clear ancestral link in the history of pre cinema: multi‑view sequencing and mechanical viewing anticipate the eventual marriage of 3D and motion. As artifacts, they showcase how optical innovators pushed the limits in the 1860s to make images more dynamic, long before film reels.

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The Negretti & Zambra Graphoscope on the other hand, featured a rotating mechanism holding multiple stereoscopic views. It appears in their 1886 catalogue simply as the Graphoscope, yet it’s equipped with stereo lenses and supports sequential 3D viewing. Introduced around 1864 following Rowsell’s Graphoscope patent, manufactured circa 1870, made of mahogany and walnut, built in four sizes (small to extra-large). Paper or glass stereoviews approximately 3.35 × 6.69 inches in size.

These units are rare survivors; most catalogue entries (pictured) outnumbered physical finds, meaning few are available to collectors today. Think of the Negretti & Zambra Graphoscope as a high-end Victorian rotary viewer: it merged mechanical sequencing with 3D imagery, prefiguring later multi-image and animated devices.

_{Photograph image Stereoscopy History}

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He is hardly known in the realm of photography. Born in Schleswig, Germany, he is best known for his pioneering work in electrical oscillations, which laid foundational groundwork for wireless communication technologies. He studied chemistry and physics at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, and Kiel, joining the Burschenschaft Hannovera fraternity in Göttingen. In 1857, he earned his PhD from Kiel University with a dissertation on electric spark discharges, improving upon Wheatstone’s rotating-mirror technique.

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Feddersen’s experiments are considered a cornerstone of electrodynamics, and his original setup is displayed at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, recognizing him as a co-founder of wireless technology. The photographic plates showing the reflected sparks I read, did at one point exist, but have not been seen in decades on any printed page.  

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The Gorham Kaleidoscopic Colour-Top was also called Kaleidoscope Tops, Chameleon Tops, Cinephantic Tops, or Trocheidoscopes. It showed “beautiful forms identical to those of the kaleidoscope” of multiplied colours as the discs rotate.

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the Kaleidoscopic Colour-Top is an excellent example of the rule that an impression is received by the eye in an almost imperceptibly short period of time

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Wires that have been bent into different shapes are inserted into the toy’s hollow and central axis, adding to its amusement. The instrument is made up of two concentric wheels that spin in opposite directions and at equal or variable velocities.

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“From the length of successive sensations on the retina,” Gorham explained how the colours appear mixed on the spinning top.

The theory was based on the well-known experiment of whirling a stick, ignited at one end (the sparkler’s trail effect), i.e., Apparent Motion.

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The movement is a series of wheels that can achieve a pace of at least 1,000 revolutions per minute. The rear wheel has device discs, and the front wheel has a number of perforated black discs. Regrettably, no animations of the Gorham Kaleidoscopic Colour-Top can be found. I would love to see one in action.

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Here from Boys Playbook of Science, (John Henry Pepper, George Routledge and Sons, London, 1866) we have Professor Pepper explaining the Kaleidoscopic Colour-Top, what it is and how it works, on pp318 and 319.

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The Kaleidoscopic Colour-Top is an excellent example of the rule that an impression is received by the eye in an almost imperceptibly short period of time (1/14^th of a second), and that the impression is not immediately effaced, but persists for an assignable period.

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1858
COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPHY
HENRY PEACH ROBINSON (1830-1901)
Robinson, who was a professional photographer for only a short period, gave us the world’s first Composite Photograph – that of a young woman pretending to be dying. A photo-montage, or composite photograph.

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A photo montage / composite is created by using two or more negatives to create a positive. In modern Cinematic terms the travelling matte and matte photography was developed from this practise.

This Albumen silver print of Robinson resides at George Eastman House Collection, Rochester.

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The negatives for When the Day’s Work is Done were attached in pairs to a sheet of glass and the final image was made in three printings of the pairs. It became the most copied Robinson print of all.

This genuine peasant genre scene of domestic rural life, came to Henry Peach Robinson by chance.

He describes how;

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Ella Ravilious, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum has kindly provided me with one of the When the Day’s Work is Done negatives from 1877 which are part of the Royal Photographic Society collection at the V&A.

Below are three images of that negative.

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SEE how matte (composite) photography has found its way from Henry Peach Robinson in 1854 to the modern cinematic experience. In this twenty-five-minute video, Industrial Light Magic explains it all.

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He used it to get around the limitations of exposure and depth of field, but also to compose ‘ideal’ scenes. He was a founding member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood (1892), a group of photographers rebelling against the Royal Photographic Society’s more scientific/technical leanings. Robinson is a polarizing figure. Admirers see him as a visionary who established photography as an art. Critics argue he dragged it backward, chaining it to painting instead of letting it develop its own strengths. Either way, his experiments with constructed imagery were early forerunners of photomontage and conceptual photography.

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A PHOTOGRAPHER AS CINEMATOGRAPHER
Robinson wasn’t a proto filmmaker, but his work shares a lineage with true pre cinema pioneers because of how he staged, layered, and constructed imagery rather than simply recording it. Pre cinema entertainments like the Phantasmagoria, a Magic Lantern tableaux, or Dioramas were all about staging scenes, as emotional, allegorical, or dramatic. Robinson’s Fading Away (1858) is essentially a photographic tableau vivant. Like a lantern slide drama, it combined art direction, careful lighting, and emotional charge to simulate a lived narrative moment. In this sense, he kept alive the theatrical and pictorial staging traditions that Magic Lantern lecturers had exploited for decades.

Pictured: At the Millers, Henry Peach Robinson, 1894.

With pre cinema optical devices such as a Polyorama, illusion often depended on layering images, slides, or transparencies.  Robinson’s multi-negative process is a photographic analogue of this. He built a scene in parts (foreground, background, figures) and combined them into a seamless whole just as lanternists combined painted glasses to simulate transformations. This anticipates later cinematic montages: assembling a single ‘illusion’ out of disparate fragments.

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He was basically articulating in photography what showmen were demonstrating with light and optics: illusion is legitimate art. The same middle-class Victorian audiences that filled lantern lecture halls were buying Robinson’s photographs and reading his treatises. In both cases, they expected staged ‘effects,’ moral narratives, and technical wonder. Robinson’s success depended on this cultural appetite for constructed realism, exactly the soil from which cinema sprouted. H. P. Robinson was to photography what Étienne-Gaspard Robertson was to the Phantasmagoria: a manipulator of fragments, shadows, and staged realities, packaging illusion as art.

Both helped prepare audiences to accept moving pictures not just as tricks, but as expressive, dramatic art.

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The four photographs by Robinson telling the tale in Cinematographic form in 1858 from left to right:

🎞️ 1. Red packs for the trip to grandma’s house
🎞️ 2. She arrives at the door of her grandmother’s house
🎞️ 3. She discovers the wolf in grandmas’ bed, dressed as her
🎞️ 4. Home safe, she tells of the ordeal

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composite photography found it’s way into cinematography as matte photography, and now his Cinematographic Photography paves the way for story-boarding

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There are not enough photographs to depict movement and opaque projection would be pointless but you’ll get the idea.

Viewing from left to right, see a short visual story-board below.

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Successful story-telling via successive Cinematographic Photography. Robinson’s Red Riding Hood series were Albumen prints from wet collodion negatives.

Was this a wolfs head or a well-trained dog?

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SEE a short five-minute biovid on most of Henry Peach Robinson’s work called Masters of Photography.

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Pictured: These two wee ones are Robinson’s two little daughters Maude and Ethel-May Robinson from 1868.

Robinson was a professional photographer for only seven years (1857-1864) due to the photo-chemicals which caused him ill health.

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Our earliest extant photograph taken from the air while in flight, is taken by James Wallace Black (1825-1896) in Boston on 13 October 1860.

Left is a portrait of Black on p120 of In Memoriam: J. W. Black, in Wilsons Photographic Magazine March 1896.

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1858
APERTURE / DIAPHRAGM / f STOP
JOHN WATERHOUSE (1806-1879)
Waterhouse was a British astronomer and meteorologist from Halifax, Yorkshire, England. He built an observatory there and a garden for exotic plants collected during his travels. He is best known for inventing the “Waterhouse stops” in 1858, a photographic equipment innovation that allowed photographers to control the amount of light entering a camera by using interchangeable diaphragms with different aperture sizes. The plates had different aperture diametres that could be inserted into a slot in the lens housing. These are the earliest-actual-physical fstops I know of.

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In 1839, Waterhouse travelled the world for health reasons, and his home laboratory was a place of study for local scientists, including Louis John Crossley. He also contributed to local publications, such as John Horner’s book Buildings in the Town and Parish of Halifax (1835). Here, a Voigtlander Lens showing the slot (on the top) where the Waterhouse stop was slotted into.

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an f stop comes from being written as a fraction, therefore the letter f

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N. B.
According to correspondence that appeared in an issue of the Journal of the Photographic Society of London in 1859 pp137 and 138, the same idea also came to a man named H. R. Smyth.

Documentation states this was two years earlier in 1856.

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Here, in Journal of the Photographic Society of London the letter from J. B. Reade on the Waterhouse diaphragm the editor was referring to.

It’s from the Journal of the Photographic Society of London 9 April 1859, pp254 and 255 (published July 1858).

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Left are three examples of Waterhouse Stops. Photograph Jon Tarrant.

Right is an illustration showing two apertures open, and almost closed.

^{Images Photography Life}

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Think of an aperture of f/8 as the fraction 1/8. An aperture of f/2 is equivalent to 1/2. An aperture of f/16 is 1/16 and so on. More light requires an f stop like f/2, or f/2.8.

Less light requires you to-stop-down to f/8, f/11, or f/16 etc.

^{Image Photography Life}

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Left, another Dallmeyer Lens with a cased set of Waterhouse stops.

Right is an illustration of a Carl Zeiss rotating diaphragm from 1906 — one diaphragm with five apertures.

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Joseph d’Almeida, in 1858, described a three-dimensional Magic Lantern presentation that projected slides through red and green filters, with the audience wearing green and red goggles to experience the stereoscopic effect. This is considered one of the earliest realizations of anaglyph 3D images, where two superimposed images, filtered in complementary colours, create a sense of depth when viewed through coloured glasses. Louis Ducos du Hauron, a pioneer in colour photography, built on this concept and is credited with producing the first anaglyph stereoscopic photographs in 1891.

He printed two negatives—one red and one blue—on the same paper, which, when viewed through red and blue glasses, produced a 3D effect. His 1893 treatise, L’Art des anaglyphes, and a presentation to the Society of Science, Letters, and Arts of Agen, detailed this technique, where he humorously offered to relinquish his patent rights if someone could create an anaglyph of the moon.

This is the first 3D or anaglyph Magic Lantern show I know of. D’Almeida’s earlier work with lantern projections and coloured filters influenced the broader development of anaglyph technology, which Ducos du Hauron advanced years later.

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This concept by Joseph D’Almeida was later refined into the anaglyph, a single print of overlapping images in red and green/blue.

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1858
ASTROMETEOROSCOPE / ASTROMETROSCOPE
S. PICHLER
S. Pichler, a Hungarian engineer active around 1858, is credited with inventing the Astrometeoroscope / Astrometroscope, a pioneering optical device designed to demonstrate the phenomenon of Apparent Motion.

This device projected a dynamic display of geometrical patterns resembling stars and meteors, achieved through a sophisticated mechanism involving two metal plates with slits moving in opposite directions. The device was notable for its innovative approach to creating animated effects using light and shadow. Little information is found on this large (14.8-inch x 5 inch) slide or the man who projected a lacework of dots forming constantly changing geometrical lines and patterns through a projecting lantern.

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I know he was an Hungarian engineer who devised an inventive mechanism consisting of two metal plates obliquely crossed with a rectangular plate-pulley movement with slits going in opposite directions.

Accounts state it was an apparatus for demonstrating persistence of vision on the big screen. The device’s intricate design and the complexity of its mechanism made it a significant contribution to pre cinema optical entertainment.

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Added as a novelty performance to the Royal Polytechnic Institution (1838-1881) evening program, Pichler kept the only version of the Astrometroscope he had made, hidden and locked away, inaccessible to anyone. It was brought out only for presentations.

This secrecy, combined with the lack of surviving examples or detailed documentation, has contributed to the obscurity of both the device and its inventor in the history of optical entertainment.

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Pichler’s Astrometeoroscope stands as an early and sophisticated attempt to create animated visual effects, reflecting the inventive spirit of the 19th century in exploring the possibilities of light and motion.

1858
ADRIEN ALBAN TOURNACHON (1825-1903)
Brother to Nadar the famous photographer, Adrien takes twelve sequenced photographs of himself in phases of motion. I’ve obtained them from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

We understand why the sequences: he and his brother were going to create moving pictures.

But in 1858, how?

^{Contact sheet image Getty Museum}

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if only the Tournachon brothers could have seen this

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FAST FORWARD TO 1865
GASPARD-FÉLIX TOURNACHON (1820-1910)
Sometime this year Nadar takes twelve sequential photographs of his own, sitting in a chair as stiff as a board. The stiff-as-a-board part looks awkward, but just like his brother seven years earlier, the desire to see motion was overpowering.

They knew how to take the pictures, both being accomplished in this regard. The projecting was the issue.

^{Contact sheet image Wikimedia Repository}

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^{Image Microscopist}

Above are London Stereoscopic Company stereoviews showing day and night scenes of the interior of the 1862 London International Exposition at the Crystal Palace in London.

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Today Getty Images own over 40,000 glass-plate negatives from the former LSC archives, which went out of business in 1922. In its heyday, LSC was the largest business of its kind in the world.

Many of its glass plates, some the size of window panes, were re-made into greenhouse glass.

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In 1858 Chevalier makes a claim that he used an iris diaphragm 18 years earlier (1840). Nicéphore Niépce had used an iris aperture. Iris diaphragms are used to this day.

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Even today a diaphragm is used in an enormous variety of products, not only cameras.
One example below.

pic.twitter.com/He5SulzQwE

— Iris Calculator (@IrisCalculator) November 8, 2021

1858
OPTICS
ANDERS JÖNS ÅNGSTRÖM (1814-1874)

Anders Ångström was a Swedish physicist and astronomer who is widely considered the father of spectroscopy.

In his research, Ångström expressed the results in the unit (one ten-billionth of a metre) that now bears his name.

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Compare one pixel on your computer screen and you get 264, 583.3 Nanometres. One Ångström equals one ten-billionth of a metre and each pixel contains 264, 583.3. Wow. And remember, we’re talking about light.

No wonder our pictures are so clear.

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As a prelude to the 20th century Motion Picture, lantern shows in the 19th century depicted historical events and news items, popular fiction, natural history, and educational themes.

Remember the soon-to-come Pathé News?

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Then the photograph made its introduction to Chromolithography in 1858, as a new format for the lantern slide.

The majority of slide manufacturers from that point began to produce photo-slides, replacing the poorer-quality hand-drawn and painted slides.

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As the 19th century drew on, lantern slides maintained their popularity as a family and public draw, especially throughout the last two decades of the century.

Lantern slides of the era are still abundant for collectors to find even to this day.

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He cataloged over 1,500 stars, discovered four comets, and contributed to planetary observations, notably of Saturn and its moons. Hevelius defined a Periscope-like gizmo that he called a Polemoscope, describing it in his work ‘Selenographia, Sive Lunae Descriptio.’ It had a mirror but was not a camera. Hevelius proposed military applications for it.

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It typically used a combination of lenses and mirrors to redirect light, enabling the viewer to see objects at an angle. A retired military surgeon, Chevalier places a camera on a land-surveyor’s stand, fixing it upon an axis allowing the camera to be turned to different points of the horizon. Pictures are obtained creating a full Panorama.

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With this new application included, science will again be enhanced by optics and the camera. In time of war, a general will have photographs of the enemy’s exact position.

I cannot over-state the great services the camera has given us throughout the centuries.

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Folk woodcuts were shown in the Kosmorama, glued together on a long tape which was wound between two rollers. This movement provided the idea of motion depending on what the viewer saw. Landscapes are best as we’ve seen with monumental paintings and moving Panoramas.

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MOTION ENTERTAINMENT TOY OF THE 19TH CENTURY
So many new motion creation toys and devices began to appear. The greatest and earliest of these is perhaps the Phenakistoscope of Plateau which used disks containing painted images.

1859
PHOTO STEREO SLIDES
ROBERT FISHER (1822-1886)
CHARLES ASPRAY
Robert Fisher was a British photographer based in London, active during the mid-to-late 19th century, with documented work in the field between 1859 and 1866. Charles Aspray appears in photographic records only for 1859, with no further details on his individual work or additional collaborations beyond this patent.

Hopwood lists a British joint-patent filed as № 2258, on 5 October 1859, for “improvements in photo stereo slides.” That listing is from an 1859 photographic / patent bibliography (a transcribed Patent Law Notices entry). According to the patent intro, the two sides of a stereoscopic glass slide show the same object in different positions; by alternately eclipsing each eyepiece the viewer sees the two positions in turn and an illusion of motion is produced. Both men lived and worked in the Westbourne Grove area of London.

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Stereo slides were one of several mid 19th century experiments that combined stereoscopy and temporal alternation to produce movement

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Pictured is Great Stone Viaduct (Over the Patapsco River) at Washington Junction c. 1863.

_{Animations Stereoscopic History on X}

This patent was not a movie camera or projector. It actually reads as an autostereo / stroboscopic trick applied to stereoscopic slides: put two slightly different images (two phases) on the two halves/sides intended for the left and right eye, then mechanically block / unblock one eye’s view in alternation.

The brain fuses the pair but sees alternating positions as a simple motion cue. Think of it as a Wheatstone Stereoscope + a shuttering mechanism that gives a crude frame-by-frame effect. Hopwood makes mention of a Kineograph in his book without specifically attributing the name to either man. He groups it with other 1850s attempts to achieve moving effects by alternation.

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Pictured is ‘Buffalo Bill’ William Frederick Cody in his first stage appearance in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie.

_{Animations Stereoscopic History on X}

Stereo slides were one of several mid 19th century experiments that combined stereoscopy and temporal alternation to produce movement. A conceptual ancestor of field-sequential stereoscopic motion and of mixed stereo / stroboscopic devices (d’Almeida, du Mont, Desvignes, and others). It’s interesting precisely because it shows inventors trying to get motion from alternation rather than continuous photographic Chronophotography.

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INSTANTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHY EXPLAINED IN PICTURES
The need to be absolutely still in early Daguerreotypes troubled Daguerre. Why—because exposure times were long and anything moving was also recorded by the emulsion on the plate. Body and Head braces were made for that reason. Everything needed to stay absolutely still otherwise a blur would occur. Children and animals were likely to be the blurriest. The remedy for dogs was paw braces.

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instantaneous photography began in the Collodion period and in aggregation with Stereoscopic cameras

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Eleven years before the Instantaneous Photograph is believed to have arrived.

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Using newspaper secured to a spinning wheel, Talbot created a spark from a set of Leyden jars, obtaining an instantaneous exposure that is documented to have been up to “1/100 000th of a second or less.” More on this in upcoming chapters.

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High vantage points were also known to be advantageous to obtaining instantaneous images. Height minimized the movement of pedestrians and traffic.

Subjects moving towards / away from the camera was preferred.

Le Prince applied both principles on Leeds Bridge in October 1888.

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The following year more and more instantaneous photographs were taken around the world by photographers like Edward Anthony, William England, Valentine Blanchard and Adolphe Braun to name four.

Pictured: A Stereo Card of St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell by Valentine Blanchard.

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Forty thousand of G. W. Wilson’s photographic glass plates still exist today. Aberdeen University houses approximately 37,000 of them.

1859
WIDE ANGLED LIQUID LENS
THOMAS SUTTON (1819-1875)
Sutton develops a wide-angle liquid lens. The lens was a glass sphere that was filled with water and produced a 140° image Panoramic View.

In 1861, Sutton created the first single lens reflex camera.

Sutton was the co-founder and editor of an English magazine known as the Photographic Notes who he co-founded with Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard.

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^{Image Museums Victoria}

Patented by Thomas Sutton in 1859, a spherical lens filled with water, which produced images of about 120°. Also shown Sutton’s Panoramic curved-plate camera containing his lens from 1861.

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This Victorian invention becomes known as the Sutton Lens and is used today by many camera manufacturers and photographers. Below is a modern Lomography camera equipped with a Sutton liquid lens.

The LomoMod Nº 1 is a beginner’s camera that you build yourself.

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Sutton’s achromatic water-filled lens fitted to this camera was the earliest Panoramic wide-angle lens ever produced and patented by Sutton on the 28th September, 1859 (Nº 2193).

^{Image Museums Victoria}

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Here is Thomas Sutton’s patented 120° image Panoramic water-filled Liquid lens from 1859, manufactured by T. Ross, London. Nº 52 on the manufacturers table.

1859
ANIMATED STEREOSCOPE
VICTOR PIERRE SIES
There is documented evidence that Sies filed a patent related to stereoscopic motion or animated stereo images. According to Ray Zone Stereoscopic Cinema and The Origins of 3-D Film, on p206, the French patent was № 43297 of 19 December, for an “Animated Stereoscope.”

It is described as a device for “hand-coloured albumen prints … in which four apparently similar photographic illustrations falling and rising can create the illusion of movement.” However, this does not appear to have led to a widely-used stereoscopic motion-picture system in the sense of projected film or commercially operated 3D moving pictures. In other words, the description seems more like a toy/optical novelty (animated stereoscopic prints) than a full motion picture camera/projector setup.

The historical survey of stereoscopic cinema notes this patent, but places it among many early experimental attempts at stereo motion, rather than something that achieved a commercial or technological breakthrough. There is no clear record of a surviving apparatus or widespread deployment of Sies’ invention (at least in the sources I found).

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The same reference is noted in the scholarship that traces early attempts at stereoscopic moving pictures, namely H. Mark Gosser’s dissertation Selected Attempts at Stereoscopic Moving Pictures and Their Relationship to the Development of Motion Picture Technology, 1852–1903,’ 1977, Arno Press) [pictured].

Gosser’s thesis is repeatedly cited in later overviews of early stereo-motion experiments. Contextual histories of precursors to cinema and stereoscopic experiments around 1858–1860 list a number of inventors experimenting with stereoscopic / stroboscopic combinations such as Du Mont, Desvignes, Duboscq, all of whom I have series on, situating Sies’ entry among many experimental, often toy-like inventions of that period.

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hand-coloured albumen prints … in which four apparently similar photographic illustrations falling and rising can create the illusion of movement

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I have not located a digitized copy or transcription of the original French patent specification in the online patent repositories and library resources I searched (Gallica/BnF searches returned many period sources but no clear, digitized Sies patent document). That means the exact wording, drawings, and technical claims remain to be verified from the primary patent record. I found no evidence of surviving apparatus or contemporary reports showing Sies’ device being built, exhibited, or commercialized. The references treat it as one of many early attempts recorded in patent literature and later bibliographies significant for historiography, but not (so far) a known functional system that influenced commercial stereoscopic cinema.

Sies did appear in the historical record as an 1859 patentee of a stereoscopic / animated image device (per Mannoni/Gosser citations). Broader histories of stereoscopy and early attempts at stereoscopic motion (Ducos du Hauron, Du Mont, Shaw, Sellers, etc.) place Sies’ patent among numerous small inventors experimenting with stereo + sequential images in the 1850s–1860s. These works treat Sies as a documented patentee / experimenter but not as an originator of a sustained, influential motion picture system. I could not immediately retrieve the original patent text or find evidence the device reached production or public exhibition.

So, we will have to treat the Sies reference as a documented patent claim, not as proof of a functioning, influential stereoscopic motion picture system.

1859
BEFORE 3D PRINTING THERE WAS 3D PHOTO-SCULPTURE
AUGUSTE FRANÇOIS WILLÈME (1830-1905)
We may think of 3D printing as a very contemporary computer software practice, and yet it appeared within twenty years of the announcement of photography. Willème was a French artist and inventor born in Sedan, Ardennes, who was originally trained as a painter and sculptor, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, focusing on historical and portrait paintings. Willème also explored sculpture, creating models for art bronzes, and became fascinated with photography in the early 1850s, initially using it to document his statuettes. His most significant contribution was inventing Photosculpture, a pioneering technique that combined photography and mechanical processes to create three-dimensional portraits, considered an early precursor to modern 3D scanning and printing.

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François Willème had laid the groundwork for 3D sculpturing by perfecting two independent ways for generating sculptural portraits by photographic and mechanical means between 1859 and 1868

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In the early 1860s a modern cupola, forty feet wide and thirty feet high constructed of iron mullions with blue and white panes of glass, was erected near the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile.

Willème called it his Photosculpture de France, the interior pictured here.

Willème’s method involved placing a subject on a circular platform surrounded by 24 cameras, each capturing a silhouette from a different angle (one every 15 degrees). These photographic profiles were projected onto a screen, and a pantograph was used to carve a 3D model, allowing for rapid, accurate reproductions of living or inanimate subjects.

He patented this process in France (14 August 1860, and 6 April 1861), the United States (9 August 1864, US Patent № 43822), and Britain (1865). The technique was celebrated for its ability to produce sculptures quickly and at lower cost, without requiring skilled sculptors.

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François Willème’s glass dome, the Photosculpture de France, was a new commercial endeavour initiated by Willème. It housed a perimetre ring of cameras directed inward at a central subject. Close up of cameras, right. Willème opened a large studio at 42 Boulevard de l’Étoile (now Avenue de Wagram) in Paris, backed by investors like banker Isaac Péreire.

The studio, featuring a grand glass rotunda, attracted high-profile clients, including Charles de Morny, Théophile Gautier, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, and gained fame at the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Despite initial success, the studio closed in 1867 due to financial difficulties, and Willème left the Société générale de photosculpture de France in 1869. The company continued without him until at least 1874.

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To create a Photosculpture, Willème arranged his subject on a circular platform surrounded by 24 cameras; one every 15 degrees, to capture their Silhouette simultaneously.

Each camera produced a set of photo-profiles, for a complete likeness of his subject in three dimensions.

Willème’s Photosculpture influenced later artists and technologies, predating Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photography and inspiring figures like Auguste Rodin, who admired the concept of capturing a subject’s “multiplicity of profiles.” However, the technique was complex and failed to reduce labor costs as hoped, leading to its commercial decline.

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To create a 3D Photosculpture image of his subject he made the information in each layer accessible by projecting each image onto a screen using a Lampascope.

Then using a Pantograph attached to a cutter, he traced each profile with the Pantograph.

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Here is an 1865 photo of the projection apparatus and Pantograph in his studio, now housed at the George Eastman Museum seen on the left. On the right are two schematics from the pages of François Willèmes 1864 French patent for his Photosculpture.

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Subsequently, reproductions were even cheaper. The first copy of a fifteen point seven inch tall sculpture cost 200 francs, the second 70 francs, and beyond that, copies were 20 francs. The price of a life-size bust was 500 francs.

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three dimensional sculpturing appeared within 20 years of the announcement of the Daguerreotype

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Willème’s company retained ownership of the plaster models, which could be fashioned into marble, bronze, clay, or biscuit porcelain, to customer specifications.

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I find it amazing technology for the year 1859 when you study the Willème process of Photosculpture. Think Muybridge. It would be another twenty years before a bank of twenty-four cameras would be used to ‘sculpt’ running horses. We saw it used in the making of The Matrix (1999).

These twenty-four cameras even detailed his pockets which appear to be full of something.

After 1869, Willème returned to Sedan, worked with a photographer, and taught drawing at Collège Turenne. He later retired to Roubaix, where he died. His works, including busts (e.g., Cunin-Gridaine, 1890) and photographic albums of Sedan’s fortifications, are preserved in places like the George Eastman House, Musée Carnavalet, and the Albertina Museum.

In 2023, his Photosculpture was featured in augmented reality at the “Dimensions – Art numérique depuis 1859” exhibition in Leipzig.

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SEE how the Auguste François Willème Photosculpture process has been incorporated into modern movie making with this video on the making of The Matrix (1999) and in particular, certain filming sequences like the roof top scene now referred to as the “dodge this” scene.

Willème’s innovative blend of art and technology marked him as a visionary, though his contributions were largely forgotten until recent rediscovery as a forerunner of 3D imaging.

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TOP
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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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