MOTION PICTURES. The motion picture is the latest machine tool in the service of expression. The endeavours to transmit emotional stimuli and experience by re-creating events have resulted in language, oral and written, the plastic and graphic arts, the stage, music and lastly the screen. Hitherto, motion had been consciously contrived for and successfully suggested in the fine arts, e.g., in the cavalcade in the frieze of the Parthenon. The motion picture camera brings action into graphic art.
The motion picture first emerged from the laboratories of ab stract science in 1894 as the Edison peep-show device known as the kinetoscope. By 1925 the motion picture seemed ready to be gin clarification and refinements of its technique. Hardly had this apparent position been reached when the electrical and radio laboratories brought forth an array of improved photo-electric cells and methods of electrical amplifications which by 1928 re sulted in the spectacular and revolutionary intrusion of the sound or "talking" picture.
Contrary to popular belief, this development of the talking picture in 1927-28 was the first true junction of the motion pic ture with electrical science. The silent motion picture, being me chanical, optical and chemical, was in no way an electrical inven tion, nor, in any strict sense, dependent upon the service of elec tricity. The talking or sound picture is, however, electrical in that it is a device for the conversion of sound vibrations into electri cal light variations photographically recorded, to be in turn elec trically reconverted into sound.
The scientific study of the optical appearances of objects in motion had begun with the investigations of Peter Mark Roget in England, resulting in a paper presented by him, under the title of "The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects," before the Royal Society in 1824. Roget's paper inspired sev eral scientists to engage in various experimental investigations, among them Sir John Herschel, and Michael Faraday. In Europe, Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau of the University of Ghent and Dr. Simon Ritter von Stampfer, in Vienna, simultane ously discovered a method for viewing a series of pictures, rep resenting phases of motion. The pictures were mounted in
chronological sequence on the rim of a disc and were observed through slots in a similar disc mounted on the same rotating shaft. The pictures, antedating photography, were necessarily drawings of assumed phases of motion. Baron Franz von Uchatius, an Aus trian artillery officer, in 1853 combined the disc device with the magic lantern and projected the pictures upon the screen. The capacity of the machine was obviously limited to a short cycle of movement. The Plateau-Stampfer labours gave rise subsequently to the invention of the zoetrope, or "wheel of life," which con tinues to be a familiar toy.
Photography.—As early as Leonardo da Vinci's experiments, photography (q.v.) had been in slow evolution. In 186o, Cole man Sellers, a mechanical engineer, in Philadelphia, made the first known endeavour to relate photography to the principle of the zoetrope. He posed his sons in a series of photographs showing them, in successive phases of a cycle of action, driving a nail into a box. The photographs were mounted on the blades of a paddle wheel, which when revolved from a given point of view produced a zoetropic effect. This machine was patented as the kinemato scope in the United States (Feb. 5, 1860. Photography then re quired so long that a true record of motion was not possible.
A complete anticipation of the motion picture was embodied in a patent application by Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron, in France, filed April 25, 1864. The Sellers method of photographing posed phases of motion was applied to a projecting zoetropic device by Henry Renno Heyl, an engineer and inventor, in Phila delphia, exhibited on Feb. 5, 1870. This was in effect the applica tion of photography to the invention of Baron Uchatius. The Heyl device was christened the phasmatrope. It carried photo graphs of six poses of a waltzing couple, repeated three times, giving a capacity of 18 pictures. It is of interest to note that the wheel on which the pictures, glass plate transparencies, were mounted was actuated by a ratchet and pawl mechanism giving each image a period of rest on the screen, a method and principle which had to be rediscovered a quarter of a century later.