Within a few years after the publication of accounts of the Uchatius motion picture projector, models were brought out by English and French inventors. Projectors, including one which threw onto a screen by means of a mirror system images of living persons, were used at the London Polytechnic Institute.
For many years after the announcement of the Uchatius picture projector, only hand-drawn designs were used. The new photographs were available only in single stills. But now the modern motion picture was just around a not too distant corner.
K. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1853
PROJECTORS by Uchatius. Shown are two versions of the 1853 picture projector. In the one above a picture disk is revolved by a crank. Below, the drawings are in fixed mounts, each before a projection lens, and the light source is revolved.
XIII
THE LANGENHEIMS OF PHILADELPHIA
Brothers Langenheim perfect a system of printing photographs on glass slides permitting projection on the screen—Projectors are made by Duboscq in France; Wheatstone and Claudet in England; Brown and Heyl in the United States.
William Penn’s “City of Brotherly Love”, Philadelphia, was the home of several important American contributors to the magic shadow art-science. The first of these were two brothers, Frederic and William Langenheim.
William Langenheim came to the United States from Germany in 1834, the year Ebenezer Strong Snell, a professor at Amherst College, introduced in America the Plateau-Stampfer magic disks. Successively, he served in Texas during its war for independence from Mexico; was present at the recapture of the Alamo by American forces; was captured himself and sentenced to be shot; escaped, and served in the United States Army in the Second Florida Seminole War.