JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    

Here’s a very unusual bit that I found deep in the a volume of the great Nature magazine, for July 9, 1896.  There were only 23 pages of text for the standard issue, with this one carrying eight very full pages of advertisements.  The issue is full of the expected–and then there was this, a great unexpected ad:

Nature was a semi-popular magazine for the general sciences in the great Victorian age, so it is quite possible that a generalist/not-necessarily-science type woud place an ad in it. The “magic” part is odd, though the “mechanical novelties” part of it makes a lot of sense.  The other ads are lovely and engrossing and cover a wide spectrum of what teh active scientific mind in 1896 might want: x-ray tubes (for the earth-shatteringly new discovery of just months earlier), rock and mineral specimens, live specimens for dissection, galvanometers, descriptions of courses for science schools, mathematical instruments, and so on.  It would be a high privilege to see teh store associated with any one of these advertisements.  

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2364

The moving picture is at base a deception, a series of still shots shown/projected/viewed in order at 16 or 24 or 48 or 60 frames per second (although a new and incredible slow-motion device records at a billion fps) which is enough to allow the brain to fill in the connections in-between the frame with the latent image (persistence of vision) so that our mind perceives that the display is continuous.  The first mechanical approximations of what we think of as the motion picture came into being at about the same time (as these things do happen) and mostly independent of one another.

[Image:  J. Mueller, Principles of Physics and Meteorology, published in Philadelphia, 1848, image on page 311.]

The biggest name in this small group is Joseph Plateau (1801-1883), who constructed a two-disk slotted device in 1832, just at the same time as Simon Ritter von Stampfer (1792-1864, working in Vienna) constructed his own version.  Plateau called his the Phenakisticope; von Ritter, the Stroboscope–Plateau’s invention is Greek for what is essentially the title of this post.

The device was relatively simple for the effect it produced and future that it held–in one iteration it was a slotted disk on which 12 or 16 images of successive motion appeared; when spun and observed through one of the slots in front of a mirror, the images seem to come alive, moving in one fluid-ish motion.  There are other models (as shown below) though the principle and effect are the same.

This was not the earliest attempt at animated motion, though it is the first that comes to resemble what would appear about 60 years later and what we could recognize as a “motion picture” but without the film.  For centuries before this there was entertainment via moving shadows cast by paper/wooden puppets in Shadow Shows (actors using figurines positioned between a light source and a white cloth/screen on which the shadows were projected.  Of course there was also this effect using the hands, with instructionals appearing in book to appeal to the Victorian parlor adult and child (like “Frank Fireside’s” Lights and Shadows on the Wall, a Handy Amusement for Winter Evenings, which actually appeared a little after the Plateau invention but which was cheaper). In the field of applied optics there was the magic lantern, a 17th century invention (though it shows up i the Leonardo notebooks) and appearing in the remarkable Athanasius Kircher’s (S.J>!) Ars MAgna Lucis et Umbrae in 1646. A bit later in the hands of Joahannes Zahn came the Kircher idea but with a sliding disk with several images on it that when projected and moved from left to right suggested movement.  The magic lantern was usually used within or behind an audience and projected forward–Robertson raised the ante on this by being one of those in the 1840’s who projected the images from behind a scree that was in front of the audience, so that the appearance of the images was unforeseen, with shocking results (and thus the naming of his apparatus quite appropriately The Phantasmagoria). 

Permanent capture of these images would come several years later with the invention of Daguerre in 1839 though that would not come into effect for moving pictures for another 50 years or so. A stop-action photograph of a continuous event would come slightly before that, naturally, with the work of Eadward Mybridge and Etienne Marey whose results were produced in the early 1880’s. Edison’s kinetoscope would come in the early 1890’s and produce the first projected moving images, though there are many other names besides Edison who could lay claim for bring the inventor of cinema, and who are all at least pioneers of the genre, including Le Prince, Varley, Friese-Greene, Dickson, and Sklandanowsky. And most of that pre-history occurred here, with Plateau and C^ie. 

It is interesting that in the short span between Plateau and the publication of the first image in Muller’s work in 1848 that so many other events in the history of science occurred that, in effect, segmented and expanded understanding of previously quick and discrete events.  Like Morse’s telegraph (1837), Theodor Schwann’s cell division (1838), Murchison’s silurian system/stratigraphy, Meyer’s conservation of energy (1842), Doppler’s effect (1842), Joule’s conservation of energy (1847), and of course, Daguerre’s invention of photography.