Marey, in France, was delighted to hear of the results of Muybridge’s work and to inspect them, for here at last was excellent confirmation of his physiological theories. Marey, while praising the work of Muybridge, noted certain errors resulting from the battery camera system—the landscape and not the animal appeared to be moving when the resulting photographs were analyzed in the Plateau magic disk and also the time interval, as noted above, was not exact.
Marey was the first to synthesize motion from the photographs by mounting them so the action could be reconstructed. Muybridge had no interest in this phase of the subject until he met Marey and learned from him. Even afterwards Muybridge continued to be interested chiefly in taking pictures and not in studying and analyzing them. Technically speaking, Marey analyzed and synthesized the results obtained in the Muybridge photographs.
In addition to using the simple Plateau disk which only one person at a time could see, Marey somewhat later had the photographs copied on glass slides, mounted on a revolving disk and projected onto a screen with the Uchatius type projector, equipped with a revolving slit shutter. This scientific demonstration was the first actual motion picture show of real motion and not posed as in the Heyl, Bourbouze and other demonstrations of about 1870.
Gaston Tissandier, editor of La Nature, in the December 7, 1878, issue wrote on “The Attitudes of the Horse, represented by instantaneous photography,” and discussed the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge of San Francisco which were on display at the firm of Brandon and Morgan Brown, 1, Rue Lafitte, Paris. The early work of Marey was mentioned and the importance of the new pictures was stressed.
On December 28, 1878, a letter of Marey’s, published in La Nature, expressed the hope that Muybridge would also record and analyze the action of birds in flight as well as animals in motion. Marey mentioned how effective such pictures would be in the Wheel of Life disks and their value in zoology. There also Marey spoke of a photographic gun which he was to invent later.
A return letter from Muybridge was published on February 17, 1879 in the same magazine: “Please have the goodness to transmit to Professor Marey the assurance of my highest esteem and tell him that the reading of his celebrated book on animal mechanism had inspired Governor Stanford with the first idea of the possibility of solving the problem of locomotion with the aid of photography. Mr. Stanford consulted me in this matter and, on his request, I decided to undertake the task. He asked me to follow a most complete series of experiments.” Muybridge said also that he was using as many as thirty cameras, mounted twelve inches apart, and that he planned to study all movements, including flights of birds in which Marey was so interested at the time.
In the March 17 issue of La Nature, Marey expressed pleasure that Muybridge was undertaking study of birds in flight. In the same issue there appeared an interesting letter from Eugene Vassel, Captain of Armament at the Suez Canal, dated January 20, 1879, commenting on Marey’s idea of a photographic gun and telling of an idea for a similar automatic camera. This illustrates that at the time, even at the ends of the earth, farthest removed from principal educational and scientific centers, the problem of photographing objects in natural movement was under study. It was then a long way, indeed, from Paris to San Francisco to Suez.
By 1880 Plateau magic disks equipped with Muybridge photographs were on sale in England and at about the same time in France. In the December 31, 1881, issue of La Nature several of these were illustrated and the possibilities of their use for instruction and entertainment were discussed. It was evident that they were common as toys in Paris. Subjects included the original one of a horse in motion and even a comedy item of a mule kicking a ball.
Muybridge, in the Summer of 1881, went to Paris and there came directly under the influence of Marey who was always most generous in expressing his appreciation of valued work. In this Marey’s nature reminds one of Plateau, the Belgian. Evidently Muybridge had not dreamed of the importance of his pictures for physiological study and other such purposes until it was explained to him. It was the pressing quest of Marey for greater perfection in duplicating nature that gave a great stimulus to the development of the motion picture art-science. Perhaps he, too, would have been surprised had he known that the motion picture, while a great instrument of science, would for many years at least find its chief use as an entertainment medium. To the last, Marey always thought of it for science and, while he did not disdain amusement uses, his interest was exclusively in broadening the field of knowledge.
In Paris Muybridge met many notables, including Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), French painter who specialized in great detail and exact duplication of nature. Meissonier appreciated the value of the Muybridge photos, as he did Marey’s work in analyzing motion in animals and men, as an aid to painting. From that time on Meissonier always kept a Plateau disk and projection device in his studio so that photographs of objects which were to be painted could be studied first by himself and his colleagues. Muybridge evidently took a liking to Meissonier and his work because he singled him out in later years as a painter (one of the few) who was exact in his representation of animals in movement even before the evidence of instantaneous photographs was available.