In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge set up a row of 12 cameras to photograph a horse in motion. Each camera made an exposure in 1/1000th of a second and recorded half-second intervals of motion. Later, he made a lantern to project images of horses in motion, but those were drawings copied from his photographs. Pictured below are some later photographs of his from 1887.
In 1882, Étienne Jules Marey used a photographic gun to explore rapid aanimal movements such as birds in flight. It was a rifle-shaped camera that exposed 12 images around the edge of a circular glass plate that spun around once per second. Later, in 1888, he built a box-shaped camera that used an intermittent mechanism to take multiple photographs on a paper film strip at a maximum speed of 120 frames per second, making him the first to combine flexible film stock ande an intermittent mechanism.
Émile Reynaud built an optical toy called the Projecting Praxinoscope in 1877. It was a spinning drum like the Zoetrope, but the viewers saw the images in a series of mirrors instead of slot. In 1882, he used mirrors and lantern to project a small series of drawings onto a screen. Starting in 1892, he gave regular public exhibitions with long, broad strips of hand-painted frames, but these looked clunky on the screen, giving a jerky and slow effect. The bands of film also couldn’t easiluy be reproduced and in 1895 he began using a camera to make his Praxinoscope films to make strips of photographs. By 1900, he was out of business because of the competition and he destroyed his machines out of despair, though there have been recent reconstructions.
In 1888, Augustin Le Prince, while in England, made some brief films shot at ~16 frames per second using Kodaks paper roll film. However, he lacked flexible celluloid to project the images and was unable to make a suitable projector. He disappeared in 1890 while in France, along with his patent applications and as a result, his camera was never exploited commercially and made no impact.
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