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Early Cine-Cameras
From: Science Museum
| By:
Rod Varley |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The invention of cinema cannot be credited to one person alone--various individuals played key roles in the development of machines that could project moving photographic pictures to an audience. Rod Varley of the Science Museum tells their story. |
 ouis Le Prince and the Lumière brothers have both been credited with the invention of cinema. Rarely should individuals be credited with absolute invention. The single lens camera built by Le Prince in 1888, and the Lumière Cinématographe developed in 1895 illustrate the point well. |
 Cinema can be described as the projection of moving photographic pictures to an audience. Its evolution was dependent on a handful of technical principles. In 1832 Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (1801-83) constructed a device which created the illusion of movement through the successive presentation of still images showing phases of that movement. Photography, the permanent record of optically-formed images on light-sensitive material, was perfected simultaneously by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) in 1839. Thus, the technical principles for cinematography were essentially understood by that date. |
By the 1870s, a number of people were experimenting with the recording and analysis of movement using photographic techniques. Photographic emulsions allowing exposures as short as one thousandth of a second were available, but only on glass plates. By the mid-1880s the key issues  were the need for long strips of pictures and a method of moving the strip intermittently at a fast enough rate to record movement smoothly--around sixteen pictures per second. In 1885, George Eastman (1854-1932) introduced a paper-based roll film.
The Le Prince single lens camera made use of Eastman's paper roll film to record a sequence of images. It is claimed that in October 1888, it was used to take 20 consecutive pictures of Leeds Bridge at a rate of about 16 pictures per second. The camera and the frames still exist, although no definite proof of their date exists. But an English patent applied for by Le Prince (1842-1890?), a French showman engineer and inventor, on January 1888 describes the principles of cinematography. |
October 1888 was also the month French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) gave a presentation to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He showed a series of pictures made at a rate of twenty a second on a roll of Eastman paper film. The chronology is further complicated in that on 17 October 1888, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) filed a caveat with the American Patent Office describing a picture version of the phonograph. |
Le Prince disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1890. One theory suggests that Edison had him murdered, although recently discovered papers suggest that Le Prince was worried by large debts--a less dramatic but more plausible explanation. It is possible that this single lens camera was the first mechanical expression of cinematography, but it may also have been faked by Le Prince's son Adolphe who, in 1898, testified against Edison's claims to be the inventor of moving pictures. |
It was, however, indisputably Edison who introduced moving pictures to the general public when the first Kinetoscope parlour opened in New York in 1894. The Kinetoscope was a coin-operated machine which gave a 'show' lasting about twenty seconds for a single viewer--the original peepshow. |
The brothers Louis (1864-1948) and Auguste (1862-1954) Lumière were the most successful photographic plate manufacturers in France. They first saw a Kinetoscope in the summer of 1894. Impressed by the demonstration but put off by the high prices demanded by Edison's agents, they decided to develop their own product. In February 1895, they patented a combined camera and projector which used an intermittent claw derived from the mechanism used in sewing machines to move the cloth. |
The apparatus was called the Cinématographe and the first public presentation was made at the Société d'Encouragement pour l'lndustrie Nationale in Paris on 22 March 1895. It showed a one minute film of workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons. Encouraged by its reception, further films were made and for the first time on 28 December 1895 audience paid to see projected, moving photographic pictures in the basement of the Grande Café, Paris. |
The Lumières commissioned an initial production run of 200 Cinématographes from the instrument maker Jules Carpentier. The Cinématographe shown above is No.8 from that run and is the earliest known example. It was purchased in Paris in 1896 and was immediately exported to Paraguay where it stayed in the same family until being sold in 1990. |
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