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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: Textiles

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Heathcote was the son of a small farmer who became blind, obliging the family to move to Long Whatton, near Loughborough, c.1790. He was apprenticed to W.Shepherd, a hosiery-machine maker, and became a frame-smith in the hosiery industry. He moved to Nottingham where he entered the employment of an excellent machine maker named Elliott. He later joined William Caldwell of Hathern, whose daughter he had married. The lace-making apparatus they patented jointly in 1804 had already been anticipated, so Heathcote turned to the problem of making pillow lace, a cottage industry in which women made lace by arranging pins stuck in a pillow in the correct pattern and winding around them thread contained on thin bobbins. He began by analysing the complicated hand-woven lace into simple warp and weft threads and found he could dispense with half the bobbins. The first machine he developed and patented, in 1808, made narrow lace an inch or so wide, but the following year he made much broader lace on an improved version. In his second patent, in 1809, he could make a type of net curtain, Brussels lace, without patterns. His machine made bobbin-net by the use of thin brass discs, between which the thread was wound. As they passed through the warp threads, which were arranged vertically, the warp threads were moved to each side in turn, so as to twist the bobbin threads round the warp threads. The bobbins were in two rows to save space, and jogged on carriages in grooves along a bar running the length of the machine. As the strength of this fabric depended upon bringing the bobbin threads diagonally across, in addition to the forward movement, the machine had to provide for a sideways movement of each bobbin every time the lengthwise course was completed. A high standard of accuracy in manufacture was essential for success. Called the "Old Loughborough", it was acknowledged to be the most complicated machine so far produced. In partnership with a man named Charles Lacy, who supplied the necessary capital, a factory was established at Loughborough that proved highly successful; however, their fifty-five frames were destroyed by Luddites in 1816. Heathcote was awarded damages of £10,000 by the county of Nottingham on the condition it was spent locally, but to avoid further interference he decided to transfer not only his machines but his entire workforce elsewhere and refused the money. In a disused woollen factory at Tiverton in Devonshire, powered by the waters of the river Exe, he built 300 frames of greater width and speed. By continually making inventions and improvements until he retired in 1843, his business flourished and he amassed a large fortune. He patented one machine for silk cocoon-reeling and another for plaiting or braiding. In 1825 he brought out two patents for the mechanical ornamentation or figuring of lace. He acquired a sound knowledge of French prior to opening a steam-powered lace factory in France. The factory proved to be a successful venture that lasted many years. In 1832 he patented a monstrous steam plough that is reputed to have cost him over £12,000 and was claimed to be the best in its day. One of its stated aims was "improved methods of draining land", which he hoped would develop agriculture in Ireland. A cable was used to haul the implement across the land. From 1832 to 1859, Heathcote represented Tiverton in Parliament and, among other benefactions, he built a school for his adopted town.

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