Claudet, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Birmingham in September, 1865, spoke “On Moving Photographic figures, illustrating some phenomena of vision connected with the combination of the stereoscope and the phenakisticope by means of photography.” Claudet noted that from the beginning of photography those acquainted with Plateau’s disk thought that pictures would be more suitable than hand drawings to show the illusions of motion. But they also sought the third dimensional effect. Duboscq’s efforts were not completely successful, according to Claudet who described a machine he had worked out. The illusion of motion was effected by having one eye see one picture and the other eye the next picture. This resulted in a simultaneous motion and solid effect. The spectator was not conscious of the vision being transferred from one eye to another. Claudet’s example was a boxer about to strike and then delivering the blow.
The pictures in Claudet’s machine must have left much to the imagination but an interesting perfection of this device was shown in New York in late 1922 and early 1923, under the name of Hammond’s Teleview. An entire theatre was equipped with a special shutter device for each spectator. The shutters were synchronized with the shutter of the motion picture projector and the spectator, looking through the device, saw motion in three dimensions. The development was not commercially practicable because the apparatus was expensive, a nuisance to the spectators and the many little motors operating the shutters created an annoying hum in the auditorium.
In the United States the Langenheim brothers did much to popularize the Stereoscope and its various modifications. About 1850 they started to make and sell stereoscopic views in Philadelphia, by mail and through agents throughout the country. In those days, with the Gold Rush in California just subsiding, there was great interest in scenic wonders and views of remote places. Stereoscopic photos had a great sale and were eventually found in almost every parlor of the day.
Before the Civil War the Langenheims opened at 188 Chestnut Street the “Stereoscope Cosmorama Exhibit.” There each spectator sat and could see one stereoscopic view after another by turning a crank. It may very well have been this turning crank system which suggested an interesting motion picture device to the fellow citizen of Langenheims, Coleman Sellers.
Coleman Sellers (1827–1907) was a skilled engineer. He reproduced Faraday’s electric experiments in this country; constructed locomotives in Cincinnati chiefly for the Panama Railroad; he also worked on the Niagara Falls power development. Even for hobbies he turned to scientific toys and gadgets. In 1856 he was called to Philadelphia again to take his place in the family engineering company. Sellers’ family dated from one Samuel Sellers who received a royal grant of land in Pennsylvania in 1682.
Sellers patented on February 5, 1861 a device which he called the Kinematoscope, evidently the first use of the word “cinema” if we exclude the Frenchman who copied Wheatstone’s device under the name of Quinetoscope.
The Sellers device revolved a series of posed still pictures, paddle-wheel fashion, before the eye of the observer. A period of relative rest was achieved through this motion as each picture was coming towards the observer for a specific time and then out of view as the next photo came into position. Sellers’ motion photos include his wife sewing, his two sons, Coleman, Jr. and Horace, playing and rocking a chair. Sellers tried to combine motion and solid effects. He found the wet plate photographic process invented by Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857) in 1850 quite unsatisfactory for “posed” motion work. Archer did not trouble to patent the process.
During the Civil War the Langenheims took nearly 1,000 pictures which were mounted for showing in the projection magic lanterns, and during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71 several hundred photographs and drawings were released by the Langenheim brothers for lantern use. The last catalogue of the firm was published in 1874 and included some 6,000 colored slides priced at $33 a dozen, and those specially photographed and made at $4 each. William Langenheim died on May 4, 1874. Frederic tried to continue the business for a time but he, too, was getting old and eventually sold out in the Autumn to Caspar W. Briggs, another early Philadelphia photographer. At the Philadelphia exhibit Frederic had a showing of the Voigtlander lenses made in Vienna which were the best then available for certain types of photographic work.
Another Philadelphian, Henry Renno Heyl (1842–1919), a friend and associate of Sellers on the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Institute, was the first person in America to develop a projector which used “posed” motion photographs. The individual pictures were taken by the same method used by Sellers for his Kinematoscope.
