The Rise of Motion Pictures

persistence of vision natural phenomenon in which the human eye continues to see an image for a fraction of a moment after the object is removed from sight

Magicians were the master showmen of Europe and the United States in the 1800s. What most people in their audiences didn't know was how important projected images were in their acts. As early as the 1790s, magic performances used slides to project mystical pictures onto smoke rising from canisters in their darkened theaters. This “magic lantern” effect grew more sophisticated through the 1800s. It makes sense, then, that magicians were particularly interested in the experiments in creating, and even projecting, moving pictures that inventors in the latter part of the century were conducting.

Shown here are the photographs Edward Muybridge took to help Leland Stanford win his bet that a galloping horse sometimes has all four feet in the air at the same time. Can you see why a talented inventor like Thomas Edison would see the seeds of motion pictures in photos like these?

In one way or another, these experiments took advantage of the phenomenon known as persistence of vision, in which the human eye continues to see an image for a fraction of a moment after the object is removed from sight. In the early 1800s, inventors created devices that took advantage of this phenomenon to fool the brain. All of these devices involved preparing a series of drawings of objects in which each drawing was slightly different from the one before it. When the drawings were made to move quickly (say, if they were pasted next to one another on the side of a revolving drum), it appeared to the viewer that the objects were moving.

Using Photographic Images to Simulate Motion

kinetoscope a moving-picture device, invented by Thomas Edison and his associates in 1892, that allowed one person at a time to watch a motion picture by looking through the viewer

Edison Vitascope a projector that made the showing of film on a large screen possible; invented by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, and premiered in 1896

While some inventors were trying to make still drawings appear to move, others were developing the same idea using photographic images to simulate motion. One particularly important figure in this blending was Edward Muybridge, who emigrated to the United States from England. In 1878, Leland Stanford, a wealthy sportsman, recruited Muybridge to settle a $25,000 bet that he had made; he had bet that all four feet of a galloping horse were sometimes off the ground at the same time. Muybridge set up twenty-four cameras close to one another at a racetrack to take photos as a horse ran by. Stanford got his money (the photographs showed all four feet off the ground), and Muybridge's work got inventors to think that motion picture photography might be possible. The trick was to be able to take twenty-four photographs with one camera rather than with twenty-four different cameras.

It was Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, who figured out how to solve this problem in 1889. Dickson discovered that the key was to use the flexible photographic film that had recently been invented by George Eastman (the founder of the Kodak film and camera company). The photographer would turn a crank, moving the flexible film in front of the lens at a constant speed. The result would be several photographs, each slightly different from the previous one. When the strip of film was developed and passed quickly in front of the eye, it gave the illusion of a moving object.

Just as he had misunderstood the potential of his recording machine, however (see Chapter 10), Edison misjudged the value of his moving-picture device, which he called a kinetoscope. He insisted that the only way to make money from it was to place it in a box into which individuals would have to drop coins in order to watch movies.

Two Frenchmen, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, proved Edison wrong in 1894, demonstrating that popular interest could be whipped up and money could be made by projecting movies to large groups. The Lumieres refused to sell their cameras or projectors. Instead, they trained people around the world to show their movies using their equipment. They focused on documenting “real life”—street scenes, parades, royalty. In contrast, Robert Paul, a competitor in England, sold moving-picture cam­eras and projectors to anyone who wanted them. Magicians were some of the first to recognize the power of this new technology and put it to use. They put it in their act as part of the whole business of illusion making.

When film projecting caught on in the United States and elsewhere, Edison rethought his movies-in-a-box approach. His agents quickly arranged to buy the rights to a projector invented by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins. Calling it the Edison Vitascope, the inventors arranged for its public debut on April 23,1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, a vaudeville site in New York City. (It's where Macy's 34th Street department store now stands.) When the Vitascope premiered, the sensation of the evening was a film entitled Rough Sea at Dover, made by Robert Paul. The view of waves crashing on Dover beach was so realistic that people in the front rows actually shrank back in their seats, fearful of getting wet.

Edison's choice of location for the unveiling of his Vitascope film was significant. Unlike the Lumiere brothers, who were interested in documenting real life, the films from Edison's company were typically silent “entertainment” performances. (An especially famous one, The Kiss, depicts a man's attempt to kiss a woman as they sit on a park bench.) In linking his moviemaking to entertainment, Edison was fol­lowing the tradition of the many magicians who had used photographs, including moving ones. Although films documenting life were certainly to become an important area of filmmaking, the major thrust of commercial moviemaking focused on entertainment.