Early film inventions – the conditions needed

The illusion of motion

Many different areas of exploration occurred in the process of inventing the cinema and many different inventions occurred over many different countries that led to cinema becoming what it is today. Scientists first explored the idea of the illusion of motion, the idea that enough frames shown rapidly in succession will give your brain the illusion of movement. Many optical toys were invented in the 19th century that took advantage of this exploration. Some examples of this are the Phenakistoscope (Image 1), invented by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and Austrian geometry professor Simon Stampfer and the Zoetrope (Image 2), introduced by an American board game manufacturing company called the Milton Bradley company in 1866.

Image 1

Image 2

Projection

In order for cinema to be invented, we also needed to invent a mechanism for projecting images in rapid succession on a flat surface. Magic lanterns (image 3) were previously used to project glass lantern slides. However these glass slides were too big and hard for projecting many images in rapid succession.

Image 3

Film material

Next, what was necessary was a clear surface on which to expose successive images through a camera (at least 16 frames in a second). In 1826, Claude NiĆ©pce created the first still photograph (image 4) on a glass plate, although it needed a long exposure time (8 hours). Glass or metal was then commonly used for photography, but as there were no negatives, you could have only 1 copy of each image and exposure time was usually many minutes for each image. Henry Fox Talbot introduced paper negatives in 1839 (image 5), but it wasn’t until 1878 that split-second exposure times were possible.

Image 4

Image 5

Flexible projection material

The photographs needed to run through a camera rapidly and therefore be projected rapidly. George Eastman made a camera in 1888 (image 6) called the Kodak that photographed images on sensitised paper. He then introduced celluloid film, a transparent roll of film that could be easily and quickly passed through the camera for filming and projection.

Image 6

Shutter mecchanisms

A suitable mechanism was then necessary to repeatedly stop the exposure and intermittently cover the film and the next frame moves into place in the camera. All these inventions and ideas mentioned throughout this page came together to form the basis of the invention of cinema.

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