The Romance of Modern Invention: Containing Interesting Descriptions in Non-technical Language of Wireless Telegraphy, Liquid Air, Modern Artillery, Submarines, Dirigible Torpedoes, Solar Motors, Airships, &c. &c.Williams, Archibald
Science
The Romance of Modern Invention: Containing Interesting Descriptions in Non-technical Language of Wireless Telegraphy, Liquid Air, Modern Artillery, Submarines, Dirigible Torpedoes, Solar Motors, Airships, &c. &c.
Williams, Archibald
Inventions
To make the living picture a success two things were needed; some
method of securing a very rapid series of many pictures, and a machine
for reproducing the series, whatever its length. The method was found
in photography, with the advance of which the living picture’s
progress is so closely related, that it will be worth while to notice
briefly the various improvements of photographic processes. The
old-fashioned Daguerreotype process, discovered in 1839, required an
exposure of half-an-hour. The introduction of wet collodion reduced
this tax on a sitter’s patience to ten seconds. In 1878 the dry plate
process had still further shortened the exposure to one second; and
since that date the silver-salt emulsions used in photography have had
their sensitiveness to light so much increased, that clear pictures
can now be made in one-thousandth of a second, a period minute enough
to arrest the most rapid movements of animals.
By 1878, therefore, instantaneous photography was ready to aid the
living picture. Previously to that year series of photographs had been
taken from posed models, without however extending the choice of
subjects to any great extent. But between 1870 and 1880 two men, Marey
and Muybridge, began work with the camera on the movements of horses.
Marey endeavoured to produce a series of pictures round the edge of
one plate with a single lens and repeated exposures.[5] Muybridge, on
the other hand, used a series of cameras. He erected a long white
background parallel to which were stationed the cameras at equal
distances. The shutters of the cameras were connected to threads laid
across the interval between the background and the cameras in such a
manner that a horse driven along the track snapped them at regular
intervals, and brought about successive exposures. Muybridge’s method
was carried on by Anschütz, a German, who in 1899 brought out his
electrical Tachyscope, or “quick-seer.” Having secured his negatives
he printed off transparent positives on glass, and arranged these last
round the circumference of a large disc rotating in front of a screen,
having in it a hole the size of the transparencies. As each picture
came opposite the hole a Geissler tube was momentarily lit up behind
it by electrical contact, giving a fleeting view of one phase of a
horse’s motion.
[5] A very interesting article in the May, 1902, issue of
_Pearson’s Magazine_ deals with the latest work of Professor
Marey in the field of the photographic representation of the
movements of men, birds, and quadrupeds.
The introduction of the ribbon film in or about 1888 opened much
greater possibilities to the living picture than would ever have
existed had the glass plate been retained. It was now comparatively
easy to take a long series of pictures; and accordingly we find
Messrs. Friese-Greene and Evans exhibiting in 1890 a camera capable of
securing three hundred exposures in half a minute, or ten per second.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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