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A Remembrance of Early Movies Oh yes, I remember seeing the first pictures that moved. In fact, I can remember back before there were any moving pictures at all. My name is Henry Daniels, and I'll be 72 this year of 1932. I loved motion pictures, I saw every one I could, and I read everything I could find about them. My only difficulty was that I was born in a small town in the Midwest. When I was a little boy, most of what there was in the way of entertainment was the stage — vaudeville, legitimate stage like Broadway, and opera and so-forth. And you couldn't go see those unless you had a lot of money. We didn't, so I had to be content with the traveling magic lantern shows that showed pictures or photographs up on a screen with a light behind them. These were great for a while, but it wasn't long before they became boring. We also had several toys which showed off something they called "persistence of vision": they were known as stroboscopic toys, and they were made on the principle that if still images pass quickly enough in front of the eye with black spaces in between, the human eye will see only one picture. If each picture is a little bit different the one before it, the eye sees it as movement. We had a Thaumatrope at home. This was a little round disc with a picture of a cage on one side, a picture of a bird on the other, and a string attached to each side. When you spun the disc really fast on the strings, it looked like the bird was in the cage. Another toy, the Zoetrope, was a round drum with slits all around and pictures inside. This one was better, because you could get different sets of pictures to go in it. We didn't have one, but the Thompsons down the road did, and I went down to play with it nearly every day. Now all this was invented back in the 1820s-1850s. It wasn't until the 1870s that the first step to moving photographs came about. That step was series photographs. British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (I remember he spelled it funny) was hired in 1872 to prove a $25,000 bet for Mister Leland Stanford, who was the governor of California. Mister Stanford had bet a friend that at one point in a horse's gallop, all four feet were off the ground at one time. It wasn't until 1877 that Mister Muybridge was able to set up cameras along a track with wires that would trip the shutters when the horse hit the wires. When these photographs were developed, they showed every part of the horse's stride. By the way, Mister Stanford won his bet — but spent over $40,000 to do it! Mister Muybridge kept working on these series photographs, and we got to see some of them in our magic lantern shows. Soon, a guy named Marey, a Frenchman, put lots of photographic plates in one camera; that way, he could take lots of pictures in a row with one camera. When these pictures were moved quickly in sequence, it looked like the picture was moving! Of course, there still weren't more than about twelve pictures per series — a pretty short movie. Meanwhile, George Eastman of Kodak fame was working on making film out of celluloid to allow thousands of frames to be shot in sequence. But to get to the real inventor of the motion picture camera, we have to look to the most famous inventor ever. Mister Thomas Edison was a legend even in his own time. Mister Edison didn't invent the moving picture camera, though. He thought he had more important things to work on himself, so he put one of his assistants, W.K. Laurie Dickson, on the project. Dickson made his first movies around 1890. None of these were shown publicly, but the earliest whole film in the Library of Congress is called Fred Ott's Sneeze. I guess you could say that Fred Ott, an Edison Company mechanic, was the first movie star! Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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