Major Precursors of Motion Pictures

Some inventors made important contributions without creating moving photographic images. Several men were simply interested in analyzing motion. In 1878, ex governer of California asked photographer Eadweard Muybridge to find a way of photographing running horses to help study their gaits. Muybridge set up a row of twelve camera, each making an exposure in onethousandth of a second. The photos recorded one-half-second intervals of movement.Muybridge later made a lantern to project moving images of horses, but these were drawings copied from his photographs into a revolving disc. He did not go on to invent motion pictures, but he made a major contribution to anatomical science through thousands of motion studies using his multiple camera setups. In 1882, inspired by Muybridge‘s work, French physiologist Jules Marey studied the flight of birds and other rapid animal movements by the means of a photographic shotgun. A fascinating and isolated figure in the history of invention of cinema was Frenchman emile Reynaud. In 1877, he had built an optical toy, the Projecting Praxinoscope. This was a spinning drum, rather like the Zoetrope, but one in which viewers saw the moving images in a series of mirrors rather than through slots.Around 1882, he devised a way of using mirrors and a lantern to project a brief series of drawings on a screen. In 1888,Thomas Edison, already the successful inventor of phonograph and the electric lightbulb, decided to design machines for making and showing moving photographs. Since Edison‘s phonograph worked by recording sound on cylinders, he tried fruitlessly to make rows of tiny photographs around similar cylinders. He devised Kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a peephole device that ran the film around a series of rollers. Viewers activated it by putting a coin in a slot. Kinetoscope film can be shown on a modern projector. Initially, however, the film was exposed at about forty six frames per second- much faster than the average speed later adopted for silent filmmaking. For about 2 years, the Kinestoscope was highly profitable, but it was eclipsed when other inventors found ways to project films on a screen. L