known as the magic lanternand his zoopraxis-
cope(a version of the magic lantern, with a revolv-
ing disc that had his photographs arranged around
the center), Muybridge gave the first public demon-
stration of photographic images in motion—a cum-
bersome process, but a breakthrough.
In 1882, Marey, a French physiologist, made the
first series of photographs of continuous motion
using the fusil photographique(another form of
the chronophotographic gun), a single, portable
camera capable of taking twelve continuous images.
Muybridge and Marey later collaborated in Paris,
but each was more interested in using the process
for his own scientific studies than for making or
projecting motion pictures as such. Marey’s inven-
tion solved the problems created by Muybridge’s
use of a battery of cameras, but the series was lim-
ited to forty images—a total of 3 or 4 seconds.
The experiments that Janssen, Muybridge, and
Marey conducted with various kinds of moving pic-
tures were limited in almost every way, but the
technologies needed to make moving pictures on
film were in place and awaited only a synthesis.1891–1903: The First Movies
Who invented the movies?^6 Historic milestones such
as this are seldom the result of a few persons work-
ing together on a single idea but rather the product
of many dreams, experiments, and inventions. Like
the making of movies, their invention was the prod-
uct of collaboration. It did not occur in one moment,
but rather took place in four major industrialized
countries—the United States, France, England, and
Germany—in the years just prior to 1895. Further-
more, in attempting to answer the question, we
must distinguish between moving pictures that
were projected onto a surface for an audience and
those that were not.
In 1891, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, work-
ing with associates in Thomas Edison’s research
laboratory, invented the Kinetograph (the first
motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope(a
peephole viewer). The first motion picture made
with the Kinetograph, and the earliest complete
film on record at the Library of Congress, was
Dickson’s Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze12Series photography Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series
of photographs documenting a horse in motion were made
possible by a number of cameras placed side by side in the
structure pictured here [1]. The cameras were tied to
individual trip wires. As the horse broke each wire, a
camera’s shutter would be set off. The result of this
experiment—a series of sixteen exposures [2]—proved that
a trotting horse momentarily has all four feet off the ground
at once (see the third frame). Series photography has been
revived as a strategy for creating special effects in
contemporary movies.
(^6) An invaluable history of the invention of the movies, and one
on which this section draws, is Charles Musser’s The Emer-
gence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, History of the
American Cinema, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 1990; repr.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 437