A JOURNEY THROUGH CINEMATOGRAPHY CAMERAS

When first moving pictures were shown on ‘The Lumiere Cinematograph’ on December 28, 1895 in a Paris cafe “The Arrival of a Train” at  La Ciotat Station, on their special machine.

Many thought that movies would never become popular. In less than a year, cinemas started to open in Europe and the USA. People loved movies.

Invention of Cinematographic cameras happened almost at different parts of world. Here, a glimpse of events those lead to see the most fascinating Invention of Motion picture cameras.

• 1670 – Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke developed the first portable photographic camera, “Camera Obscura”.

• 1826 – Niepce has the honour of taking the world’s first photograph and it is named as “View from the window at Le Gras”.

• 1829 – Louis Daguerre formed a partnership with Niepce to improve photographic process.

• 1839 – Henry Fox Talbot makes an important advancement in photograph production with the introduction of negatives on paper as opposed to glass. Also around this time it became possible to print photographic images on glass slides which could be projected using magic lanterns.

• 1846 – Important in the development of motion pictures was the invention of intermittent mechanisms – particularly those used in sewing machines.

• 1877 – Emile Reynaud introduces the Praxinoscope. Similar in design to Horner’s Zoetrope, the illusion of movement produced by the Praxinoscope was viewed on mirrors in the centre of the drum rather than through slots on the outside.

• 1878 – Eadweard Muybridge achieves success after five years of trying to capture movement. He did this by setting up a bank of twelve cameras with trip-wires connected to their shutters; each camera took a picture when the horse tripped its wire. Muybridge developed a projector to present his finding. He adapted Horner’s Zoetrope to produce his Zoopraxinoscope.

• 1880 – Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb in Menlo Park.

• 1882 – Etienne Marey, a French Scientist made a chronophotographic gun which was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second and the most interesting fact is that all the frames were recorded on the same picture. The result was a photographic gun which exposed 12 images on the edge of a circular plate. Etienne Jules Marey, inspired by Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies, begins his own experiments to study the flight of birds and other rapid animal movements.

• 1882 – Emile Reynaud expands on his praxinoscope and using mirrors and a lantern is about to project moving drawings onto a screen.

• 1889 – Etienne Marey used George Eastman’s film on the Cinema projector. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema.

• 1890 – Eastman Kodak began mass producing flexible film in the early 1890s.

• 1892 – Thomas Alva Edison meets Etienne Marey to learn about the uses of film.

BOULY CINEMATOGRAPHE

Leon  Bouly,  a French inventor created a device called ‘cinematographe’.

In Bouly Cinematographe, the film is driven by a segmental roller and stopped intermittently by a pressure pad. Bouly deposited a second patent on 27^th December 1893, for a machine said to be capable of both filming and projecting. The Bouly used a film which were not perforated that would not have given a steady projection.

These devices are conserved in the French Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts) Paris.

Later the patent for this device was bought by the Lumiere Brothers, who applied it to their own device in 1895.

BLACK MARIA (EDISON THEATRE)

In 1893, world’s first film production studio, the Black Maria or the Kinetographic Theater was completed on the grounds of Edison’s Laboratories (at West Orange, New Jersey) for the purpose of making film strips for the Kinetoscope.  Its construction began on December 1892.

In early May 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Edison conducted the world’s first public demonstration of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria with a Kinetoscope viewer.

(TO BE CONTINUED)