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poses, the subject assuming the key positions of the ac-
tion being represented.
Since stereoscopic photography was the latest ad-
vance, experimenters naturally supposed that moving
photographs would be stereoscopic. London-based
daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet was intrigued by the
idea of stereoscopic phenakistiscopes, but limited his
experiments to a two-phase stereogram. Essentially a
standard stereoview portrait, each image represented the
extremes of a simple staged movement; for example a
man putting a cigarette to his lips and removing it. In
the viewer a revolving shutter obscured and revealed
each picture in turn, one to each eye, resulting in a
stereo portrait with a limited motion effect. Similar
stereograms were later sold in France.
Other inventors actually constructed photo-phena-
kistiscopes. French optician Louis Jules Duboscq’s
was called the Bioscope; one version used twelve sets
of stereo halves, left/right images placed one above
the other. Subjects—the sole surviving example shows
a beam engine—were posed in incremental positions
representing a sequence of motion, and brought dimen-
sionally to life in the special viewer.
Englishman William Thomas Shaw patented his Ste-
reotrope in 1860. A series of stereocards was mounted
in an octagonal case, incorporating an ingenious drum
shutter. In the United States in 1861, Coleman Sell-
ers patented several ideas for stereo-motion viewers
including his Kinematoscope, a drum-form tabletop
stereoviewer holding six sequential stereograms.
The inventor of the stereoscope, Charles Wheatstone,
attempted various stereo motion viewing devices be-
tween 1849 and 1870. An existing machine has a strip
of images showing a soldier presenting arms.
One rather advanced result was successfully achieved
in 1864 by Scottish mechanic James Laing. A conven-
tional stereoscopic plate camera was used to photograph
a wooden model village, with cotton-wool smoke rising
from a cottage chimney, and a revolving windmill. Frus-
trated by the zoetrope’s limited capacity—“this fi xity of
number ... does not suit the motoroscopic effect”—the
pictures for his successful Motoroscope viewer were
arranged on a long continuous belt, one of several ideas
suggested by experimenter Peter Desvignes some years
earlier. Sadly, no images have survived. This stop-mo-
tion animation preceded trick fi lming by thirty years.
Duboscq produced a projecting phenakistiscope
c.1853, while Austrian lanternist Ludwig Leopold
Döbler toured with a similar device, built by inventor
Franz Freiher von Uchatius. In the 1860s lanternists de-
veloped the ‘wheel of life’ slide—a projection phenakis-
tiscope, with silhouette images arranged on small glass
discs—for use with an ordinary optical lantern. Another
lantern device, Beale’s choreutoscope (1866), comprised
a sequence of images on a strip of glass, moved intermit-
tently by a pin-and-cam movement similar to the maltese
cross later used in motion picture fi lm machines. None
of these projection devices made use of photographs, but
static photographic images on glass had been projected
by magic lantern from around 1850.
Projection of photographic images shown suffi ciently
fast to give an appearance of life in motion was achieved
by Henry Renno Heyl in Philadelphia in 1870. The
photographs, including a repeating sequence of a waltz-
ing couple, were posed individually. Not yet a motion
picture of a subject in real-time motion, neverthless suc-
cessful public Phasmatrope performances were given.
As exposure times decreased and ‘instantaneous’
photography became possible, attempts were made
to photograph sequences taken in ‘real time,’ with the
subject actually in movement—with or without the
complications of stereoscopy.
In 1876 English political activist Wordsworth Do-
nisthorpe patented the Kinesigraph camera for multiple
glass plates. With the announcement of Edison’s newly-
invented phonograph Donisthorpe suggested using
results from the two instruments together, to screen
images of a politician speaking, for instance, but the
technology was not suffi ciently advanced.
In contrast to those who had a vision of reproducing
moving scenes by photography, whom we could call
proto-cinematographers, there were also experimenters
whose main aim was to obtain a series of images show-
ing phases of motion for purposes of analysis. Initially
these chronophotographers had little interest in synthe-
sizing such sequences into a moving picture, but later
most would attempt some form of motion synthesis.
Eadweard James Muybridge, an accomplished
and well-known photographer, was commissioned to
photograph a trotting horse to determine whether it
had all four feet off the ground at one time. His single
photographs were suffi ciently clear to confi rm that the
horse was indeed ‘unsupported’ during it’s trot and
gallop. Muybridge extended his experiments in 1878 to
include sequences of animals and humans taken with
12 or more cameras, some of which were stereoscopic.
Despite using low-sensitivity wet plates, his results
were successful and engravings of his horse sequences
widely published, proving of great interest to French
physiologist Etienne Jules Marey.
Marey had been analysing human, animal and bird
movement using mechanical devices attached to the
subjects, connected to an instrument that drew traces on
a revolving drum. Muybridge’s photo sequences were
important in confi rming results obtained by Marey’s
traces, and the physiologist asked the photographer to try
sequences of birds. Muybridge’s success was limited, so
Marey devised a photographic gun for shooting twelve
photographs on a glass disc. Though small and lacking
detail, the images were useful for Marey’s research