DVD Demystified

The World Before DVD
Captured Light
27
Early motion-picture toys used drawings, which were intriguing but fell
short of the real thing. The first attempts at capturing a direct visual representation
of reality began about the same time, in the 1820s, with Niépce
and Daguerre’s photographic plates. Black and white (or sepia and white)
and hand coloring were the only options for about 40 years, until Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell studied vision and determined that all colors
could be represented with combinations of red, green, and blue. In 1861,
he produced the first color photograph from a three-color process. Photography
steadily improved but remained motionless for almost 60 years after
its invention. In 1877, the same year Edison invented the phonograph, photographer
Eadweard Muybridge captured images of a moving horse as it
tripped strings attached to 12 cameras in sequence. 5 He realized that the
motion could be recreated by placing the photographs on a rotating wheel
and projecting light through them. This led to another string of oddly
named “magic lantern” gadgets such as the zoopraxiscope, phantasmagoria,
chronophotographe, and zoogyroscope. The early recording process was very
cumbersome, requiring that dozens of cameras be painstakingly set up. In
1882, Étienne-Jules Marey was inspired by Muybridge’s work to create a
single camera, patterned after a rifle, that exposed 12 images in 1 second on
a rotating glass plate. This was a great improvement, but it made for a very
short viewing time and did not bode well for popcorn sales. It was not until
7 years later that the celluloid roll film developed by George Eastman—the
founder of Kodak—was used by Thomas Edison’s engineers to create the
Kinetograph camera and the Kinetoscope viewing box for movies lasting up
to 15 seconds. Lessons from the past were apparently missed by these and
other pioneers, who tried to use continuous film motion only to rediscover
that repeated still images were required. Edison’s lead engineer, William
Dickson, shot the first film in the United States, Fred Ott’s Sneeze.
The Lumière brothers were the first to project moving photographic pictures
to a paying audience in 1895. Their first film, no less inspired than
Dickson’s, was the spine-tingling Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The
motion picture industry was born and began to steadily improve the technology
and the content. Projection speeds varied from 15 to 24 frames per
5 The story goes that Muybridge was hired by a former governor of California in an attempt to
win a bet that all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground during a gallop. Muybridge’s success left
the governor $25,000 richer, although he may have paid Muybridge more than that to develop
the experiments.