It was described as a camera and projector in one, but that combination, without many modifications, has never been entirely practical.
Greene had an unhappy, ill-starred life and though not a great inventor deserved better. About 1899 he made attempts at color motion pictures, using a rotating lens with a filter, but here again he was unsuccessful. About 1911 he was brought to the United States to testify in the motion picture patent suit but he did not impress the American attorneys representing Edison’s opponents, and he never was called to the witness stand. About 1915 it was reported that he was destitute and Will Day, English motion picture expert, and others, organized a relief fund in his behalf and later he had a minor position with a color photo-engraving firm. At a dinner in his honor in 1921, just after he had once again told the story of his pioneer work on motion pictures, he dropped dead. Apparently his projection efforts were doomed to failure, because they never were based on sound principles. The double lens system has never been made to work satisfactorily.
Marey, who was now using strips of coated celluloid for his instantaneous photographs, sought to devise a suitable projector. This he accomplished in 1893 with what was perhaps the first efficient motion picture projector which could handle more than one brief scene, using long strips of coated celluloid film instead of pictures set on a disk. In order to obtain sufficient illumination, it used sunlight instead of an electric arc or other source of light. This limited Marey’s projector to laboratory use, though as late as 1915 some experts claimed that sunlight was better than the electric arc for magic lantern projection.
An available illustration of Marey’s projector shows the path of the rays which are reflected from the sun by a heliostat. That device was invented by the Dutch scientist, Willem Jacob, and is simply a mechanically driven reflector which keeps the light of the sun focused on a single spot by compensating for the movement of the earth. In Marey’s projector the sun’s rays are interrupted by a hand driven shutter wheel and reflected by two mirrors through the film, the light then passing through the projection lens and throwing the pictures onto the screen.
“The motion of the film,” Marey wrote, “as it halts at each flash, is brought about by an apparatus not shown in the figure. It is similar to that of the simple chronophotographic apparatus (camera), with the difference that the positive film, having its ends fastened together to make an endless belt, passes over a series of rollers which stretch it taut.” This roller system was probably similar to that used by Edison in his peep-show Kinetoscope.
The projector, Marey himself admitted, was not perfect. “The principal imperfection of the chronophotographic projector was a jerkiness due to imperfect equality of the intervals.” This resulted from the fact that Marey did not perforate the film because he thought the space along the edge should not be wasted. He knew that Edison had been successful through the use of four perforations on each side of every frame, or picture. He was free to copy this, had he wished, because Edison did not patent the method abroad.
Meanwhile, Marey continued his work and finally, in 1898, announced a successful projector system which overcame his chief difficulty which was the even spacing of the pictures without using the Edison perforations.
His system featured specially constructed rollers which gripped the edges of the film. The next year Marey worked out a combination of the motion picture camera and the microscope, opening the way for much progress in scientific research. He continued to study motion and in 1899 improved his early photographic gun camera so that it would handle about 65 feet of film at one loading. Marey, who was interested only in science and not in commercial exploitation, needed funds which he eventually received from the American Smithsonian Institute, whose secretary, Samuel P. Langley, the aeronautical pioneer, had been following the French physiologist’s motion picture studies, including his pioneer work in photographing air currents.
Marey’s motto, so far as motion pictures were concerned, was: “It is not the most interesting motion pictures that are the most useful.” In this he stood against commercialization, and always for instructional uses.
In 1893 Demeny broke with Marey and patented on October 10, 1893, under his own name, a modification of the Marey camera, which he called the Bioscope. This he was able to do, even though the method had been known at Marey’s laboratory, simply because Marey had never actually adopted it. French patents were regularly issued upon application.