Category: Technology, History of

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. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Yes, this elegant, oversized, well written 1946 pamphlet explains in fabulous and excruciating detail how to use the telephone–and it does indeed come with a two-part heavy paper telephone receiver for the reader’s practice. It is packaged in an envelope in the back of the pamphlet with a large drawing explaining how to put the two pieces together.   The work is just so fulsome, wholesome, forthright, exacting and thorough that it just makes the casual reader stop in their tracks to applaud the effort of explanaion.  For example, it isn’t until page 13 that we get to pick up the receiver (and listen for the dial tone). I’ve reproduced some of the table of contents to give an idea of the extent of the telephone usage. 

What brings this so close to being from out of the science fiction past is that the booklet is ten years older than your narrator.  Atanasoff’s ABC, Bell Labs Mark II, Bletchley’s  Colossus, and Harvard’s Mark I machines existed, television was begnning to explode and half-doom radio for all time, and telephones were on their semi-last-leg of exploding their way into more American homes and businesses.  But somehow, here on the verge of the greatest electrical revolution in history, we were getting instructions on how to pick up the telephone.  But I’m really not complaining here, not at all–its just the nexus of the “how to listen for a dial tone” and the coming of the ENIAC one year after this pamphlet is published that is so startling.

Even so, this instructional is more complete and (of course) better written than any of the computer manuals that came with any of the machines that I’ve purchase in the last 30 years. It is a thing of great and supra-obvious beauty.

This is another example of a small job done Very Correctly.

JF Ptak Science Books                                                     

The ‘twenties is know as the “speed” decade—everything was going faster, increasing its speed, expanding to the limit:  this was true for the ability to communicate via telephone, the appearance of commercial radio, the great increase in the speed of trains and planes and automobiles; the music was fast, the movies were talking. 

There are many iconic images relating speed and the roaring twenties—generally though this spectacular cover for Otto Willi Gail’s Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltenal…vom Feurerwagen zum Raumschiff (1928)is much less frequently seen, though it certainly does get the message across.  Otto Gail was a creative German science fact and science fiction writer with a strong background in following the scientific and technical accomplishment in rocketry of the age, especially the works of Max Valier¹ and Hermann Oberth². Raketenkraft was more a peek into the future and pop techy work for kids than a straight-out scifi novel like his The Moon Stone, which was a story that brought us Atlantis, space travel and hidden ancient culture in the underground Ice World.

It’s the unfortunate Ice World that attracts my attention around Gail, swimming around his interesting and tech-involved scifi world like a melting and failing Moon made of hundred-year NYC garbage scows, the idea of a good engineer-turned-trash cosmologist named Hans Horbiger, whose ideas wound up being whispered into the ears of many monsters. Horbiger had some sort of vision-dream about stuff in 1894 and spent the next 30+ years fleshing out the idea, which sounds bad from the very start when the author admits to finding “Newton wrong”.  Anyway without losing too many minutes thinking about this time-hole, Horbiger’s theory worked ice up to being the primary and primordial ingredient of all processes in the universe, with ice planets circled by ice moons, and some sort of gooey ice ether to make it all go ‘round. Oh yes: there were superior ice people living in the interior of the earth.  Horbiger died in 1931, but his many followers managed to work the theory into a presentable Jewish-baiting anti-relativity Deutsche Physik form for the new government of Adolph Hitler in 1933, and it was there that his ideas took hold in the cancerous Himmler and Hitler and others, a happy marriage at last, the ridiculous to the unspeakable. I’m not sure where the ice people are today, but I did saw some awful History Channel show that stated that Hitler never did die in the bunker and was removed by submarine to the interior ice people of earth, flying around the insides of our globe “in a UFO”.

And so I associate poor Gail (1896-1956) with the Horbiger mess, and not his good work in science reporting and popularization.  So it goes.

The other thing that you can say about Horbiger—he had a full-out behemothian mustache.  That’s about it.

Notes

1. Valier seems to have been the first person  killed in a rocket-related incident, blistered by his exploding rocket-car.

2.  Oberth is another one of those Germans working at Peenemunde (along with Wernher von Braun and a great host of others)  trying to kill as many people in the UK as possible who wound up in Huntsville, working for our government.  It is all so problematic.  It is interesting that there is little in the Air and Space Museum (as part of the Smithsonian system)  that mentions von Braun.  He is burioed in a simple grave in a cemetery next door to a Jewish cemetery in Alexandria , Virginia.  I also remember going to some restaurant in the diamond district that, in very high bad taste, served up a beer called the Wernher von Brown–von Braun certainly had his hands covered in Jewish blood at least to the wrists, and to have a product so stupidly named as that in that place was just one of those impossible things that happen every day.