In Muybridge’s first work in which he photographed a horse in motion, he used a row of cameras in front of which the horse proceeded. The horse in passing before them, and coming before each particular camera, broke a string connected with its shutter. This in opening exposed the plate and so pictured the horse at that moment, and in the particular attitude of that moment. This breaking of a string, opening of a shutter, and so on, took place before each camera. Muybridge in his early work used the collodion wet plate, a serious disadvantage. Later he had the convenience of the sensitized dry plate and was also able to operate the cameras by motors.
When Marey began to employ a camera in his researches he registered the movements of an entire action on one plate; while Muybridge’s way was to take but one phase of an action on one plate. The two men differed greatly in their objects and methods. Marey in his early experiments, at least, traced on one plate or chart the successive changes in attitudes of limbs or parts, or the positions of certain fixed points on his models. But Muybridge procured single but related pictures of attitudes assumed by his subjects in a connected and orderly sequence. The latter method lent itself more readily to adaptation for the projecting lantern and so became popularly appreciated. Perhaps it is for this reason that Muybridge has been referred to as the father of the motion-picture.
The photographic gun was Marey’s most novel camera. With this he caught on a glass plate the movements of flying birds. This instrument was suggested by a similar one used by M. Janssen, the astronomer, in 1874, to make a photographic record of the transit of a planet across the sun’s disk.
MAREY’S PHOTOGRAPHIC GUN.
The kineograph, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, by which the illusion of motion was given to a series of pictures arranged like a book, formed the basic idea for a number of other popular contrivances. One of these was the mutoscope, in which the leaves were fastened by one edge to an axis in such a way that they stood out like spokes. The machine in operation brought one leaf for a moment at rest under the gaze of the eye and then allowed it to snap away to expose another picture in its place. When this was viewed in its turn, it also disappeared to make way for the next in order.
PLAN OF LUMIÈRE’S KINORA.
An apparatus similar in principle to the mutoscope.
As yet experimenters were not altogether sure in what particular way to combine a series of graduated pictures so as to produce one living image. Besides the ways that have been exemplified in the apparatus so far enumerated, some experimenters tried to put photographs around the circumference of a large glass disk somewhat on the order of the phenakistoscope. Heyl’s phasmatrope, of 1870, was on this order.