942
on fl ight. Marey continued with chronophotography,
devising large single-lens cameras using wheels or
discs with images set around the periphery. Individual
images often overlapped, enabling a larger number to
be recorded. Overlapping was not of consequence for
analytical purposes, and Marey was not concerned with
producing motion pictures.
The interest in Muybridge’s work continued. To
1870s eyes the frozen positions of the horses’ limbs had
seemed ludicrous. Muybridge placed the sequences in a
zoetrope to synthesise the movement, which appeared
perfectly natural, confi rming the veracity of each com-
ponent photograph. The zoetrope being limited to a
small audience, he devised a projecting phenakistiscope
or Zoogyroscope (later Zoopraxiscope), to present
sequences in motion on a large screen. The large glass
discs featured painted silhouettes based closely on his
sequence photographs. The Zoopraxiscope horizontally
compressed the shape of each image on projection,
so the painted images were elongated to compensate.
Some discs featured a composite scene based on
several sequences, such as a bull chasing a man, and
a few included elements that were pure imagination.
Muybridge now bridged both camps: those content to
simply analyze a strip of sequential images, and others
trying to invent a motion picture process. In the 1880s
he lectured in Europe and the USA, projecting slides
of his individual photographs alternately with animated
silhouette sequences, generating widespread interest in
moving pictures. In 1884 Muybridge was contracted to
continue his work, at the University of Pennsylvania.
His sequences included zoo animals, nude studies of
women, and male athletes. Taken on dry plates, they
included more detail than his earlier attempts.
Meanwhile in Germany in 1884, Ottomar An-
schütz—who had designed shutters for instantaneous
photography—started chronophotographic experiments,
with 12 and then 24 cameras. His images, taken on
fast dry plates, were of high quality. Like Muybridge,
Anschütz became interested in animating sequences of
athletes and animals. His zoetrope introduced an inge-
nious arrangement of three rows of slots of different
numbers, for viewing strips with differing numbers of
images, essential when photographing animals moving
at different speeds. Anschütz’s other viewing devices
included a large wheel with images rear-illuminated by
a synchronised electrical fl ash lamp.
By 1888 Marey was using sensitized paper strips
for his photographic analysis. Other inventors, with a
vision of cinema, recognised the need for such a fl ex-
ible medium. Their cameras mosly used some form of
intermittent movement, the fi lm being stationary as each
frame was exposed. In 1888 Louis Aimée Augustin Le
Prince, a Frenchman working in England, was perhaps
the fi rst of these visionaries to successfully photograph
sequences on paper ‘fi lm’: traffi c on Leeds bridge, his
son playing the melodion, and the family in their garden.
The images were transferred to belts of glass slides for
projection. Several projector designs failed to produce
an exploitable result, and Le Prince got into debt. On a
visit to France he disappeared, an apparent suicide.
With the availability of rollfi lm, Donisthorpe restarted
his motion picture experiments, involving draughtsman
William Carr Crofts. Their 1889 camera, designed for
paper rolls but later using celluloid, featured a unique
optical compensation mechanism. Although taken at a
slow rate, a camera test of London’s Trafalgar Square
seemed promising, but unperforated fi lm made projec-
tion diffi cult and success eluded them.
Portrait photographer William Friese-Greene became
interested in motion photography through his friend
James Arthur Roebuck Rudge, whose magic lantern
shows had included simple devices for animated move-
ment. Friese-Greene demonstrated one of Rudge’s
lanterns, and then developed with engineer Mortimer
Evans a camera for taking sequences on a fl exible
support—initially paper, later celluloid. At around fi ve
pictures per second the results were limited, and there
was no successful method of motion projection. Their
1889 patent included pins on the drive roller to improve
traction. A fi lm of King’s Road Chelsea (c. 5 fps) can
today be manipulated into a proto-motion picture. In
1893 Friese-Greene patented a stereoscopic sequence
camera devised by Frederick Varley, but again the frame-
rate was slow.
These fi lm pioneers found successful projection
elusive, but the earlier chronophotographers had by the
early ‘90s developed techniques for commercial exploi-
tation in peepshow machines, using very short photo
sequences in motion. An arcade version of Anschütz’s
“Electrical Wonder” machine, with images set around
the periphery of a disc, was produced in quantity, and
appeared at the Columbian Exposition, Chicago, in
1893.
Marey’s assistant, gymnastics specialist Georges
Demenÿ, supervised the production of chrono sequences
featuring soldiers and athletes. Demenÿ designed the
‘beater’ camera movement, later adopted by many other
fi lm pioneers. Exposed on strips of unperforated cel-
luloid negative, the individual positives were mounted
around a Phonoscope disc, for direct viewing or small-
scale projection. One intended use was (mute) talking
portraits, to help the deaf to lip-read. Demenÿ’s interest
in the commercialisation of motion pictures eventually
caused a split with his scientist mentor. (Marey had brief-
ly attempted fi lm projection, but his 1892 projector was
not successful.) Initially a commercial failure, with the
advent of perforated fi lm Demenÿ’s beater mechanism
would be successfully exploited in early cinematograph
equipment by the Gaumont Company.