HF The History of Photography 600pág

442 The gelatine period
removed in the open air-the first daylight-loading spool. The whole mechanism was
put in motion by turning a crank, and the moment the animal began to run, the
operator pressed a trigger to start the film: photographs were taken as long as pressure
was maintained on the trigger. The 'chronophotographe' enabled Marey to
secure a much longer and more rapid series of pictures than had ever been possible
before-as many as sixty exposures a second could be made, and much better photographs
were obtained of the rapid movements of birds than with the gun camera.
Unfortunately while Marey was trying to improve his ingenious invention he learned
that his assistant GEORGES DEMENY had made a small modification to it and had thus
been able to take out a patent in his own name.23
In 1896 Marey perfected his chronophotographe. He now obtained perfectly
equidistant images-without the usual recourse to perforation of the film and to
pegged rollers. Because of the inertia of the film spools he found it more satisfactory
to keep them constantly revolving, but a small part of the film was arranged in a
loose loop between two sets of feed-rollers, and this loop was suddenly straightened
out in front of the lens, remaining stationary for the exposure. It was then jerked on
again, and was steadily wound on to the receiving spool. This is the method in use
in cine-cameras (but with perforations).24
Marey not only photographed motion, but also projected it in cinematographic
form. In May 1 892 he had described to the Academie des Sciences (of which he was
elected President in 189 5) a projector in which sixty or more positives printed on a
transparent film band were thrown on a screen by electric light. Though his pioneer
work in cinematography was subsequently overshadowed by the improved apparatus
of the more businesslike Lumiere brothers, just as William Friese-Greene was overshadowed
by Thomas Edison, we should not forget the originators, however brilliant
the improvers.
A comprehensive and well illustrated summary of chronophotography in all its
applications is given in Marey's Le Mouvement, Paris, 1894, of which an English
translation was published in London the following year. This work ranks as a classic
in physiological science and has been somewhat loosely acclaimed as the first book
on cinematography.25 After Marey's death Professor LUCIEN BULL at the Institut
Marey in Paris continued the researches to which its founder had devoted his life, and
published them in the Travaux de l' Association de I' Institut Marcy.
Marey was not the only person stimulated to experiment with animated photography
by Muybridge's work. A host of others took up the idea, but realizing that
a battery of cameras was both expensive and impracticable for the further development
of animated photography towards cinematography, they-like Marey-tried
to secure similar results with a single camera and from one point of view. Success in
the reproduction of motion was not possible until improvements in the manufacture
of celluloid provided a long thin strip of sensitized material (1889) upon which any
desired number of photographs could be taken in rapid succession (at least sixteen per
second-the minimum speed at which persistence of vision functions). Glass disks
were severely limited in their picture-holding capacity. Even in the most successful
instrument of this type, the Kammatograph ( 1898) with up to 5 50 tiny photographs
arranged spirally round the edge of a 12 in. diameter disk, the running time of the
projected pictures was only 45 seconds-obviously too short for commercial purposes.
Indeed, LEO KAMM exhausted the possibilities of animated photography on glass.
Pre-eminent among the early experimenters and inventors of cinematographic
apparatus using celluloid film were-besides Professor Marey and Georges Demeny
-the brothers AUGUSTE and LOUIS LUMIERE in France; THOMAS EDISON in America ;