Muybridge's

n. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), Engels geboren Amerikaanse fotograaf, uitvinder van een vroege projector onder de naam zoopraxiscoop

Muybridge, Edward James Muggeridge.

◙ n. מויברידג', שם משפחה; אידווירד מויברידג' (1830-1904), צלם אמריקאי יליד בריטניה, ממציא אחד מהמקרנים הראשונים הידוע כ-זופרקסיסקופ

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◙ פוקסיסקרפוז-כ עודיה םינושארה םינרקמהמ דחא איצממ,הינטירב דילי יאקירמא םלצ,(4091-0381) 'גדירביומ דריוודיא ;החפשמ םש,'גדירביומ◄

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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He was born Edward Muggeridge, but later changed his name, taking the Saxon spelling of his first name and altering his surname, first to Muygridge and then to Muybridge. He emigrated to America in 1851, working in New York in bookbinding and selling as a commission agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company. Through contact with a New York daguerreotypist, Silas T.Selleck, he acquired an interest in photography that developed after his move to California in 1855. On a visit to England in 1860 he learned the wet-collodion process from a friend, Arthur Brown, and acquired the best photographic equipment available in London before returning to America. In 1867, under his trade pseudonym "Helios", he set out to record the scenery of the Far West with his mobile dark-room, christened "The Flying Studio".

His reputation as a photographer of the first rank spread, and he was commissioned to record the survey visit of Major-General Henry W.Halleck to Alaska and also to record the territory through which the Central Pacific Railroad was being constructed. Perhaps because of this latter project, he was approached by the President of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, to attempt to photograph a horse trotting at speed. There was a long-standing controversy among racing men as to whether a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground at any point; Stanford felt that it did, and hoped than an "instantaneous" photograph would settle the matter once and for all. In May 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse "Occident", but without any great success because the current wet-collodion process normally required many seconds, even in a good light, for a good result. In April 1873 he managed to produce some better negatives, in which a recognizable silhouette of the horse showed all four feet above the ground at the same time.

Soon after, Muybridge left his young wife, Flora, in San Francisco to go with the army sent to put down the revolt of the Modoc Indians. While he was busy photographing the scenery and the combatants, his wife had an affair with a Major Harry Larkyns. On his return, finding his wife pregnant, he had several confrontations with Larkyns, which culminated in his shooting him dead. At his trial for murder, in February 1875, Muybridge was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide; he left soon after on a long trip to South America.

He again took up his photographic work when he returned to North America and Stanford asked him to take up the action-photography project once more. Using a new shutter design he had developed while on his trip south, and which would operate in as little as 1/1,000 of a second, he obtained more detailed pictures of "Occident" in July 1877. He then devised a new scheme, which Stanford sponsored at his farm at Palo Alto. A 50 ft (15 m) long shed was constructed, containing twelve cameras side by side, and a white background marked off with vertical, numbered lines was set up. Each camera was fitted with Muybridge's highspeed shutter, which was released by an electromagnetic catch. Thin threads stretched across the track were broken by the horse as it moved along, closing spring electrical contacts which released each shutter in turn. Thus, in about half a second, twelve photographs were obtained that showed all the phases of the movement.

Although the pictures were still little more than silhouettes, they were very sharp, and sequences published in scientific and photographic journals throughout the world excited considerable attention. By replacing the threads with an electrical commutator device, which allowed the release of the shutters at precise intervals, Muybridge was able to take series of actions by other animals and humans. From 1880 he lectured in America and Europe, projecting his results in motion on the screen with his Zoopraxiscope projector. In August 1883 he received a grant of $40,000 from the University of Pennsylvania to carry on his work there. Using the vastly improved gelatine dry-plate process and new, improved multiple-camera apparatus, during 1884 and 1885 he produced over 100,000 photographs, of which 20,000 were reproduced in Animal Locomotion in 1887. The subjects were animals of all kinds, and human figures, mostly nude, in a wide range of activities. The quality of the photographs was extremely good, and the publication attracted considerable attention and praise.

Muybridge returned to England in 1894; his last publications were Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His influence on the world of art was enormous, over-turning the conventional representations of action hitherto used by artists. His work in pioneering the use of sequence photography led to the science of chronophotography developed by Marey and others, and stimulated many inventors, notably Thomas Edison to work which led to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s.

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Eadweard Muybridge, Edward James Muggeridge.

אידווירד מויברידג' (1830-1904), צלם אמריקאי יליד בריטניה, ממציא מקרן ראשוני הידוע כ-זופרקסיסקופ

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◙ פוקסיסקרפוז-כ עודיה ינושאר ןרקמ איצממ,הינטירב דילי יאקירמא םלצ,(4091-0381) 'גדירביומ דריוודיא◄

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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The son of a commercial photographer, Anschütz entered the business in 1868 and developed an interest in the process of instantaneous photography. The process was very difficult with the contemporary wet-plate process, but with the introduction of the much faster dry plates in the late 1870s he was able to make progress. Anschütz designed a focal plane shutter capable of operating at speeds up to 1/1000 of a second in 1883, and patented his design in 1888. it involved a vertically moving fabric roller-blind that worked at a fixed tension but had a slit the width of which could be adjusted to alter the exposure time. This design was adopted by C.P.Goerz, who from 1890 manufactures a number of cameras that incorporated it.

Anschütz's action pictures of flying birds and animals attracted the attention of the Prussian authorities, and in 1886 the Chamber of Deputies authorized financial support for him to continue his work, which had started at the Hanover Military Institute in October 1885. Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge in America, Anschütz had set up rows of cameras whose focal-plane shutters were released in sequence by electromagnets, taking twenty-four pictures in about three-quarters of a second. He made a large number of studies of the actions of people, animals and birds, and at the Krupp artillery range at Meppen, near Essen, he recorded shells in flight. His pictures were reproduced, and favourably commented upon, in scientific and photographic journals.

To bring the pictures to the public, in 1887 he created the Electro-Tachyscope. The sequence negatives were printed as 90 x 120 mm transparencies and fixed around the circumference of a large steel disc. This was rotated in front of a spirally wound Geissler tube, which produced a momentary brilliant flash of light when a high voltage from an induction coil was applied to it, triggered by contacts on the steel disc. The flash duration, about 1/1000 of a second, was so short that it "froze" each picture as it passed the tube. The pictures succeeded each other at intervals of about 1/30 of a second, and the observer saw an apparently continuously lit moving picture. The Electro-Tachyscope was shown publicly in Berlin at the Kulturministerium from 19 to 21 March 1887; subsequently Siemens \& Halske manufactured 100 machines, which were shown throughout Europe and America in the early 1890s. From 1891 his pictures were available for the home in the form of the Tachyscope viewer, which used the principle of the zoetrope: sequence photographs were printed on long strips of thin card, perforated with narrow slots between the pictures. Placed around the circumference of a shallow cylinder and rotated, the pictures could be seen in life-like movement when viewed through the slots.

In November 1894 Anschütz displayed a projector using two picture discs with twelve images each, which through a form of Maltese cross movement were rotated intermittently and alternately while a rotating shutter allowed each picture to blend with the next so that no flicker occurred. The first public shows, given in Berlin, were on a screen 6×8 m (20×26 ft) in size. From 22 February 1895 they were shown regularly to audiences of 300 in a building on the Leipzigstrasse; they were the first projected motion pictures seen in Germany.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology, Photography, film and optics

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At the age of 19 Marey went to Paris to study medicine, becoming particularly interested in the problems of the circulation of the blood. In an early communication to the Académie des Sciences he described a much improved device for recording the pulse, the sphygmograph, in which the beats were recorded on a smoked plate. Most of his subsequent work was concerned with methods of recording movement: to study the movement of the horse, he used pneumatic sensors on each hoof to record traces on a smoked drum; this device became known as the Marey recording tambour. His attempts to study the wing movements of a bird in flight in the same way met with limited success since the recording system interfered with free movement. Reading in 1878 of Muybridge's work in America using sequence photography to study animal movement, Marey considered the use of photography himself. In 1882 he developed an idea first used by the astronomer Janssen: a camera in which a series of exposures could be made on a circular photographic plate. Marey's "photographic gun" was rifle shaped and could expose twelve pictures in approximately one second on a circular plate. With this device he was able to study wing movements of birds in free flight. The camera was limited in that it could record only a small number of images, and in the summer of 1882 he developed a new camera, when the French government gave him a grant to set up a physiological research station on land provided by the Parisian authorities near the Porte d'Auteuil. The new design used a fixed plate, on which a series of images were recorded through a rotating shutter. Looking rather like the results provided by a modern stroboscope flash device, the images were partially superimposed if the subject was slow moving, or separated if it was fast. His human subjects were dressed all in white and moved against a black background. An alternative was to dress the subject in black, with highly reflective strips and points along limbs and at joints, to produce a graphic record of the relationships of the parts of the body during action. A one-second-sweep timing clock was included in the scene to enable the precise interval between exposures to be assessed. The fixed-plate cameras were used with considerable success, but the number of individual records on each plate was still limited. With the appearance of Eastman's Kodak roll-film camera in France in September 1888, Marey designed a new camera to use the long rolls of paper film. He described the new apparatus to the Académie des Sciences on 8 October 1888, and three weeks later showed a band of images taken with it at the rate of 20 per second. This camera and its subsequent improvements were the first true cinematographic cameras. The arrival of Eastman's celluloid film late in 1889 made Marey's camera even more practical, and for over a decade the Physiological Research Station made hundreds of sequence studies of animals and humans in motion, at rates of up to 100 pictures per second. Marey pioneered the scientific study of movement using film cameras, introducing techniques of time-lapse, frame-by-frame and slow-motion analysis, macro-and micro-cinematography, superimposed timing clocks, studies of airflow using smoke streams, and other methods still in use in the 1990s. Appointed Professor of Natural History at the Collège de France in 1870, he headed the Institut Marey founded in 1898 to continue these studies. After Marey's death in 1904, the research continued under the direction of his associate Lucien Bull, who developed many new techniques, notably ultra-high-speed cinematography.

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See also: Demenÿ, Georges

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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As a young man Georges Demenÿ was a pioneer of physical education in France, and this led him to contact the physiologist Professor Marey in 1880. Marey had made a special study of animal movement, and Demenÿ hoped to work with him on research into physiological problems related to gymnastics. He joined Marey the following year, and when in 1882 the Physiological Station was set up near Paris to develop sequence photography for the study of movement. Demenÿ was made Head of the laboratory. He worked with the multiple-image fixed-plate cameras, and was chiefly responsible for the analysis of the records, having considerable mathematical and graphical ability. He also appeared as the subject in a number of the sequences. When in 1888 Marey began the development of a film camera, Demenÿ was involved in its design and operation. He became interested in the possibility of using animated sequence photographs as an aid to teaching of the deaf. He made close-up records of himself speaking short phrases, "Je vous aime" and "Vive la France" for example, which were published in such journals as Paris Photographe and La Nature in 1891 and 1892. To present these in motion, he devised the Phonoscope, which he patented on 3 March 1892. The series of photographs were mounted around the circumference of a disc and viewed through a counter-rotating slotted disc. The moving images could be viewed directly, or projected onto a screen. La Nature reported tests he had made in which deaf lip readers could interpret accurately what was being said. On 20 December 1892 Demenÿ formed a company, Société Générale du Phonoscope, to exploit his invention, hoping that "speaking portraits" might replace family-album pictures. This commercial activity led to a rift between Marey and Demenÿ in July 1893. Deprived of access to the film cameras, Demenÿ developed designs of his own, patenting new camera models in France on 10 October 1893 and 27 July 1894. The design covered by the latter had been included in English and German patents filed in December 1893, and was to be of some significance in the early development of cinematography. It was for an intermittent movement of the film, which used an eccentrically mounted blade or roller that, as it rotated, bore on the film, pulling down the length of one frame. As the blade moved away, the film loop so formed was taken up by the rotation of the take-up reel. This "beater" movement was employed extensively in the early years of cinematography, being effective yet inexpensive. It was first employed in the Chronophotographe apparatus marketed by Gaumont, to whom Demenÿ had licensed the patent rights, from the autumn of 1896. Demenÿ's work provided a link between the scientific purposes of sequence photography— chronophotography—and the introduction of commercial cinematography.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Dickson was born in France of English and Scottish parents. As a young man of almost 19 years, he wrote in 1879 to Thomas Edison in America, asking for a job. Edison replied that he was not taking on new staff at that time, but Dickson, with his mother and sisters, decided to emigrate anyway. In 1883 he contacted Edison again, and was given a job at the Goerk Street laboratory of the Edison Electric Works in New York. He soon assumed a position of responsibility as Superintendent, working on the development of electric light and power systems, and also carried out most of the photography Edison required. In 1888 he moved to the Edison West Orange laboratory, becoming Head of the ore-milling department. When Edison, inspired by Muybridge's sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, decided to develop a motion picture apparatus, he gave the task to Dickson, whose considerable skills in mechanics, photography and electrical work made him the obvious choice. The first experiments, in 1888, were on a cylinder machine like the phonograph, in which the sequence pictures were to be taken in a spiral. This soon proved to be impractical, and work was delayed for a time while Dickson developed a new ore-milling machine. Little progress with the movie project was made until George Eastman's introduction in July 1889 of celluloid roll film, which was thin, tough, transparent and very flexible. Dickson returned to his experiments in the spring of 1891 and soon had working models of a film camera and viewer, the latter being demonstrated at the West Orange laboratory on 20 May 1891. By the early summer of 1892 the project had advanced sufficiently for commercial exploitation to begin. The Kinetograph camera used perforated 35 mm film (essentially the same as that still in use in the late twentieth century), and the kinetoscope, a peep-show viewer, took fifty feet of film running in an endless loop. Full-scale manufacture of the viewers started in 1893, and they were demonstrated on a number of occasions during that year. On 14 April 1894 the first kinetoscope parlour, with ten viewers, was opened to the public in New York. By the end of that year, the kinetoscope was seen by the public all over America and in Europe. Dickson had created the first commercially successful cinematograph system. Dickson left Edison's employment on 2 April 1895, and for a time worked with Woodville Latham on the development of his Panoptikon projector, a projection version of the kinetoscope. In December 1895 he joined with Herman Casier, Henry N.Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company. Casier had designed the Mutoscope, an animated-picture viewer in which the sequences of pictures were printed on cards fixed radially to a drum and were flipped past the eye as the drum rotated. Dickson designed the Biograph wide-film camera to produce the picture sequences, and also a projector to show the films directly onto a screen. The large-format images gave pictures of high quality for the period; the Biograph went on public show in America in September 1896, and subsequently throughout the world, operating until around 1905. In May 1897 Dickson returned to England and set up as a producer of Biograph films, recording, among other subjects, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Pope Leo XIII in 1898, and scenes of the Boer War in 1899 and 1900. Many of the Biograph subjects were printed as reels for the Mutoscope to produce the "what the butler saw" machines which were a feature of fairgrounds and seaside arcades until modern times. Dickson's contact with the Biograph Company, and with it his involvement in cinematography, ceased in 1911.

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See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA

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Abney, William de Wiveleslie

Acres, Birt

Anschütz, Ottomar

Archer, Frederick Scott

Baekeland, Leo Hendrik

Barnack, Oskar

Bayard, Hippolyte

Bennett, Charles Harper

Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré

Blumlein, Alan Dower

Brewster, Sir David

Carbutt, John

Carlson, Chester Floyd

Chevalier, Charles-Louis

Chrétien, Henri Jacques

Claudet, Antoine François Jean

Cros, Charles

Cros, Hortensius Emile Charles

Dagron, Prudent René-Patrice

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé

Dallmeyer, John Henry

Dallmeyer, Thomas Rudolphus

Dallos, Joseph

Dancer, John Benjamin

De Forest, Lee

Demenÿ, Georges

Dickson, William Kennedy Laurie

Ding Huan

Ducos du Hauron, Arthur-Louis

Eastman, George

Edison, Thomas Alva

England, William

Fizeau, Armand Hippolyte Louis

Franklin, Benjamin

Gabor, Dennis

Galilei, Galileo

Gascoigne, William

Godowsky, Leopold Jr

Guinand, Pierre Louis

Hero of Alexandria

Herschel, John Frederick William

Hunt, Robert

Hurter, Ferdinand

Ives, Frederic Eugene

Jenkins, Charles Francis

Joly, John

Klic, Karol

Land, Edwin Herbert

Lauste, Eugène Augustin

Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van

Le Gray, Gustave

Lippershey, Hans

Lippman, Gabriel

Lumière, Auguste

Lumière, Charles Antoine

Maddox, Richard Leach

Maiman, Theodore Harold

Marey, Etienne-Jules

Marton, Ladislaus

Mees, Charles Edward Kenneth

Monckhoven, Désiré Charles Emanuel van

Muybridge, Eadweard

Neri, Antonio Ludovico

Niepce, Joseph Nicéphore

Niepce de St Victor, Claude Félix Abel

Paul, Robert William

Petzval, Josef Max

Poitevin, Alphonse Louise

Ponton, Mungo

Pouncy, John

Pretsch, Paul

Ravenscroft, George

Reichenbach, Georg Friedrich von

Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad

Ross, Andrew

Schawlow, Arthur Leonard

Snellen, Hermann

Steinheil, Carl August von

Sutton, Thomas

Swan, Sir Joseph Wilson

Talbot, William Henry Fox

Taylor, William

Torricelli, Evangelista

Tournachon, Gaspard Félix

Voigtländer, Peter Wilhelm Friedrich

Waterhouse, Major-General James

Watkins, Alfred

Woodbury, Walter Bentley

Wratten, Frederick Charles Luther

Zeiss, Carl