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
A company known as the Mutoscope and Biograph Company has been formed
for the sole object of working the manufacture and exhibition of the
living picture on a great commercial scale. The present company is
American, but there are subsidiary allied companies in many parts of
the world, including the British Isles, France, Italy, Belgium,
Germany, Austria, India, Australia, South Africa. The part that the
company has played in the development of animated photography will be
easily understood from the short account that follows.
The company controls three machines, the Mutograph, or camera for
making negatives; the Biograph, or lantern for throwing pictures on to
the screen; and the Mutoscope, a familiar apparatus in which the same
pictures may be seen in a different fashion on the payment of a penny.
Externally the Mutograph is remarkable for its size, which makes it a
giant of its kind. The complete apparatus weighs, with its
accumulators, several hundreds of pounds. It takes a very large
picture, as animatograph pictures go--two by two-and-a-half inches,
which, besides giving increased detail, require less severe
magnification than is usual with other films. The camera can make up
to a hundred exposures per second, in which time _twenty-two_ feet of
film will have passed before the lens.
The film is so heavy that were it arrested bodily during each exposure
and then jerked forward again, it might be injured. The mechanism of
the mutograph, driven at regular speed, by an electric motor, has been
so arranged as to halt only that part of the film which is being
exposed, the rest moving forward continuously. The exposed portion,
together with the next surface, which has accumulated in a loop
behind it, is dragged on by two rollers that are in contact with the
film during part only of their revolutions. Thus the jerky motion is
confined to but a few inches of the film, and even at the highest
speeds the camera is peculiarly free from vibration.
An exposed mutograph film is wound for development round a skeleton
reel, three feet in diameter and seven long, which rotates in a
shallow trough containing the developing solution. Development
complete, the reel is lifted from its supports and suspended over a
succession of other troughs for washing, fixing, and final washing.
When dry the negative film is passed through a special printing frame
in contact with another film, which receives the positive image for
the biograph. The difficulty of handling such films will be
appreciated to a certain extent even by those whose experience is
confined to the snaky behaviour of a short Kodak reel during
development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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