Plateau in Belgium came to the invention of the magic disk, which was the first “motion picture” device, through his study of vision and the desire to understand more about it. Marey, by his own action and the work of others influenced by him, gave great impetus to the photographing and projection of motion pictures, through his wish to learn more about movement, the movement of life—animals, birds, and men.
Marey was one of the first great physiologists and conducted for years what was then the only private, scientific laboratory in France. He was born in Beaume, France, in 1830, and when nineteen went to Paris to study medicine. Six years later he became an interne and, in 1859, received his doctor’s degree, doing at this time his first important work on animal locomotion. In 1869 he became a professor at the College of France and three years later he was admitted to the Academy of Medicine, and, in 1878, to the Academy of Science.
About 1867 Marey started to study the attitudes of animals in movement through the aid of a Plateau magic disk and drawings made with the aid of Mathias Duval, professor of anatomy at the School of Beaux Arts. Some of the designs used by Marey in the Wheel of Life and a magic lantern projector were drawn by Col. Duhousset, a great horseman and artist, from very early and imperfect instantaneous photographs.
Prior to Marey there had been a number of attempts to record motion by photography. The most successful was by the French astronomer, Pierre Jules César Janssen (1824–1907) who used a photogun, Revolver Photographique, to record the transit of Venus in Japan in 1874. Janssen may have been influenced by Marey’s earliest work. Dr. R. L. Maddox in 1871 had developed in England dry plate photography, based on Scott Archer’s wet plate process. This helped to make instantaneous photography, or Chronophotography, as it was called, possible.
Janssen perfected the first workable motion picture camera. But it was a large, stationary piece of apparatus, limited in scope and sensitiveness. The device was described by a French astronomer, C. Flammarion, in the magazine La Nature of May 8, 1875, and by Janssen himself in the Bulletin of the French Photographic Societies of April 7, 1876. Janssen’s device took forty-eight pictures on a simple revolving plate but he said the number could easily be doubled or tripled. A time clock mechanism controlled the revolutions of the photographic plate but it was so arranged that it could also be rotated by hand. An electrical hook-up also was possible.
The influence of Plateau’s magic disk is clear and so acknowledged by Janssen. The device simply reversed the old Plateau disk which showed motion pictures through two revolving disks, one with the pictures and the other with the shutter slits. In the Janssen astronomical gun the one disk was coated with photographic chemicals and the other had the usual slits; the necessary intermittent movement was provided by the gear driven mechanism which rotated the disks.
Janssen pointed out that the apparatus could be used for physiological purposes—to study walking, running, flight and the movement of animals; but he never had time to develop the device for physiological uses, which was not in his immediate field. He was, however, interested in Marey’s later refinements and applications.
The most important “precursor” of motion picture photography and projection, so far as the basic idea was concerned, was Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837–1920), a Frenchman who developed the first successful method of printing color pictures. Louis liked science, painting and music but was held back in school on account of poor health. At the age of 15, he was a good pianist. He began his experiments in natural color printing around 1859 and by the Fall of 1868 had achieved success. The public reaction was not enthusiastic and Louis became discouraged. Many persons were hostile to his method which he hoped would bring books, illustrated with many color plates, within reach of everyone (as others following his system eventually achieved). It was for this reason that he failed to exploit his camera and picture projector idea.
In March and December of 1864 Louis Ducos du Hauron took out the first patents on a complete motion picture system, including an apparatus to register and reproduce motion by photography. The French patent was described in these words, “Apparatus for the photographic reproduction of any view together with all changes the subject undergoes during a certain time.” A mechanic of Agen where Louis lived for many years with his older brother, Alcide, constructed a model of the device. It was not successful because the available photographic materials were not sufficiently sensitive. Ducos’ patent even provided for the use of “bands” of paper; bands or reels of film finally solved the motion picture problem but not until near the end of the 19th century. As in one of Uchatius’ projectors, the camera and projector of Louis Ducos du Hauron used a number of small lenses.
Other patents taken out by this small, slender, timid Frenchman who only became truly animated when talking about one of his inventions, included color photography in 1868, a horizontal wind-mill in 1869, a combined natural and photographic camera in 1874, photographic devices in 1888 and 1892. In 1896 he again turned to motion pictures, after others had perfected them, proposing an optical system intended to do away with all interruption of light in motion picture projection and photography.