The history of film reaches as far back as ancient Greece’s theatre and dance, which had many of the same elements in today’s film world. But technological advances in film have occurred rapidly over the past 100 years. Starting in the Victorian era, many camera devices, projectors and film sizes have been developed and mastered, creating the film industry we know today.
Modern film though begins with the concepts of photography and motion pictures. Now one may ask what exactly motion pictures are. Motion pictures are a series of still pictures rapidly projected on a screen in such a way that the viewer perceives a smooth motion.
One of photography’s first concepts that started the development of motion picture was that of Visual Persistence. A concept developed by Dr. Peter Mark Roget in 1824. The basis of this concept was that the brain will persist in seeing a visual object for a fraction of a second after the image itself has disappeared or changed. If multiple images are presented one after another the visual persistence of the first image fills the time so they seem continuous.
Photography’s next step started with French artist and inventor Louis Daguerre and chemist Joseph Niepce who created the best method of photography for the time. In 1839 Louis Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype. This process involved a silver coated copper plate that is exposed to iodine fumes or a chemical bath in a dark room, which creates a film coating. This plate is then placed inside the camera. When briefly exposed to light or a strongly lit song the image is burnt onto the plate. A further chemical bath affixed the image to the plate. By the 1880’s a flexible celluloid film and a simple box camera were developed and marketed by George Eastmond.
The next step for moving images was the Phenakistoscope. Developed by by two different inventors; Joseph Plateau, a physicist in Brussels who developed the Phenakistoscope and by Simon von Stampfer, a mathematician in Berlin who developed a near-identical device that he named the Stroboscope. The device proved popular and was soon mass-produced and marketed under some more easily-pronounceable names, including Phantasmascope, Fantoscope, and even the prosaic “Magic Wheel”. The device was operated by spinning the cardboard disc and viewing the reflection of the image in a mirror through a series of moving slits. Through the distortion and flicker, the disc created the illusion that the image was moving. Women danced, men bowed, and animals leapt in short, repeating animations.
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The Vitascope was an early film-projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. The pair publicly demonstrated an image projection device at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia which they called the “Phantoscope.” This prototype of modern film-projectors cast images onto a wall or screen for a moderately large audience. The inventors, heady with the scent of success, became at odds with one another and began fighting over credit for the invention. Thomas Armat independently sold the Phantoscope to The Kinetoscope Company. The company realized that their Kinetoscope would soon be a thing of the past with the rapidly advancing proliferation of early cinematic engineering. They were very interested in this newest magic lantern and approached Thomas Edison to finance the manufacture of the instrument. Edison agreed to the deal on one condition: he would henceforth be credited with the invention of the machine that he renamed the “Vitascope”.
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Audio in films was a slow development. It began with an invention by Edison known as the phonograph. The phonograph was developed because of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern.
Photo Retrieved from Google
The next step was devising a means to showcase these films to the masses. It was at this stage the Kinetoscope by Thomas Edison was invented. The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The operation involved placing in a penny, looking through the peep hole, and turning a crank to view. By 1896, Edison was projecting motion pictures to the public for the first time in America.
photo credit: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/kinetoscope/
The nickelodeon was the first type of indoor exhibition space dedicated to showing projected motion pictures. Usually set up in converted storefronts, these small, simple theaters charged five cents for admission and flourished from about 1905 to 1915. “Nickelodeon” was concocted from nickel the name of the U.S. five-cent coin, and the ancient Greek word odeion, a roofed-over theater, the latter indirectly by way of the Odéon in Paris, emblematic of a very large and luxurious theater, much as Ritz was of a grand hotel.
Film has truly evolved. Techniques, film styles and even the theatres have advanced to meet the demand of the generations and continues to be a dominant and intriguing subject.
Jamar.Knight 